As business for the hard-drive company continued to prosper, more employees were hired to meet its growing demands. More buildings were leased and built to house the new employees. This meant more LAN segmentations and a greater demand for user connectivity to the network. LAN bridges were architecture solutions in the early part of the company's growth. Soon the flat, bridge-based network was becoming unmanageable.
Bridges merely repeat traffic from one end to the other.
Some segments such as engineering and accounting wanted to conceal their traffic for bandwidth and security reasons. Hence, the flat-earth network of bridges migrated to an environment with network routers. Network routers allow for scalability and a mixture of media. Such a network would use the FDDI ring as a backbone to the corporate network. In this tiered network architecture, multiple routers attach to the FDDI backbone.