Hello Carl,   My name is Glen; I'm with the Network Engineering Team.   We have been addressing concerns in regards to inter-branch network performance as well as scalability to support our future growth. As we were working on how and where to make changes, there has been a few key areas to which we will be improving the network for each location's Finance Department. This will be done by implementing VLANs (virtual local area networks) to better segment and secure network traffic throughout all departments. Making these required changes will temporarily impact all departments, especially Finance, after normal business hours. Before we begin this project, we want to ensure you and your Team is educated on what these changes are and how the network will better serve your needs after our work is done.   I'm not knowledgeable on all aspects of day to day finance, but I would like to explain VLANs using the Finance Department as an example. I'm sure there's an income, through various avenues, that has to tunnel through the finance department. Whether the money is from the services we provide, our 3rd party ventures/partnerships, fund-raising etc; it comes through the finance department. I assume it's safe for me to assume each one of those avenues are important for later reporting, so they are assigned a code and/or name. That is the same principle used for assigning VLANs throughout your location's network. So the security camera traffic is separated from finance traffic, the guest wifi from both, and so on.   Now, again referencing my analogy, the main account all money from each avenue (VLAN) is funneled into can be considered the "tunnel" to where I'm sure it's preferred money go into this account rather than a random customer's account. Well a VLAN tunnel in a network performs the same task for data traffic. Service-income can be considered VLAN-10, 3rd party ventures/partnerships VLAN-20, and fund-raising VLAN-30. All traffic pertaining to VLANS 10, 20, and 30 will be assigned to pass through the main account, the "trunk".   Standing back from my poor understanding of the Finance Department, that I'm positive is more faceted than I used it for, this is how networks utilize VLAN routing. From this basic explanation, imagine the possibilities on a larger scale. The vast amount of traffic that can traverse the same network, but not bottle-neck or be sent somewhere it doesn't belong makes a big difference on day to day productivity... security and speed will be improved ten-fold. I'll follow-up with the change-order and maintenance schedules requiring your approval in the next few days    I'll be happy to discuss everything in further detail, so please don't hesitate reaching out with any questions, concerns, and/or comments.     Best regards,   Glen  ... View more