The first thing Richert and his team did was settle on some standard technologies to apply across the board. For most decisions, Richert went with the tried and true, rather than gambling with an untested vendor or an unproven technology. He bought desktops from IBM, chose NetWare for file and print services, and selected Cisco for routers and switches. However, Cisco offered an unexpected price concession. But Cisco wanted all of Unity Health's business, so it offered LAN switches for the same price as the Bay hubs.
Employees have to get through two levels of security to reach the data center.
It was the decision to go with ATM on the WAN that gave Richert the most pause. In 1997, not many companies in St. Louis and not many hospitals anywhere were willing to trust their mission-critical traffic to the public ATM cloud. Needless to say, it is especially important for a hospital network to be up and running 24-7. But he needed something that was flexible, scalable and able to accommodate future moves, such as the planned relocation of the data center. Unity Health became one of the first customers of SBC Communications' ATM service.