as to pay to cool and heat the air you breathe (facilities), and for you to have a computer, a telephone, and probably a cellular phone. When all is said and done, you may easily cost the company twice what you consider to be your annual salary. Consulting costs Consulting costs are often reported differently from HR costs (this is why sometimes salaried employees are let go, and consultants are brought in to do the same work for the same or more pay). If you can redesign a network that currently is supported by three consultants SO it only needs one, you've lowered consulting costs. Increase performance or capacity Increasing performance is rarely a bad thing. The exception might be improving performance where no increase is necessary. Remote branches with 10 users probably don't need PIX 535 firewalls capable of a gigabit of throughput. On the other hand, devices that are near their limits will soon become problems if normal growth continues. Telecom links that are running in excess of 70 percent utilization should be upgraded. Routers, switches, and firewalls that regularly running at more than 50 percent CPU utilization should be considered for replacement with larger devices. Voice over IP is an excellent example of how performance bottlenecks can be serious. If your gateways can only support 50 concurrent calls, and you suddenly become busy due to growth and start dropping customer-service calls, you can bet that the money will be found to upgrade those gateways SO they can support more calls. Maxim #3 The smarter engineers will watch the network and spot trends. If you can quan- tify a trend that will translate into a required upgrade in the next budgetary cycle, you will be very well received because the change can be planned for and budgeted for ahead of time. Remember, managers don't like surprises. Be care- ful to try and spot these opportunities before there's a problem. Telling your boss the network should be improved after an outage has occurred will not make you a hero. Increase reliability Chassis