Cape County commissioners approve purchase of new network equipment

Cape Girardeau County commissioners approved a request Thursday from the information technology department to purchase network switching and wireless equipment.

Commissioners approved the use of $93,943 from IT department funds to purchase 17 switches and 23 wireless access points, along with their associated licensing, from ISD Technologies in St. Louis.

“This is our big project for the year,” IT director Eric McGowen said. “When we built the courthouse and when we consolidated dispatch, we chose that as an opportunity to kind of use a little more mature, a little higher class networking equipment.”

The new equipment, according to McGowen, provides more security for the county offices.

“We have had absolutely awesome results with the equipment that we stepped up to at the courthouse,” McGowen said. “The security is just way above and beyond what we have existing. If we see a problem or we can drill down to the port level and see exactly what’s going on in real time, what kind of activities are happening. And it’s easy to do, it’s very manageable.

“So we decided that our big project for the year would be to step up the rest of the county network to that same technology.”