Hosted Solutions, the East Coast’s leading Data Center and Managed Services Provider, has identified five issues IT managers must consider to ensure smooth data center operations in 2007. Compliance, disaster recovery, power, cooling, and IT as a service will be dominant themes in the coming year as companies manage IT assets to support business goals.

“IT resources most line-of-business managers take for granted are dependent on skilled management of data centers,” said Gary McAuliffe, Vice President and General Manager of Hosted Solutions’ Boston, MA-based managed hosting and data center facility. “In-house data centers can be a weak link if attention isn’t paid to power, cooling, disaster recovery, support for compliance initiatives, and staffing to support utility computing initiatives.”

McAuliffe advises businesses to consider the following issues:

Compliance – Recent changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure put IT on the front lines. Being able to retrieve information at a granular level – right down to specific emails – is now an IT responsibility.

Disaster recovery – Ensuring maximum data availability and uptime is crucial to a business’s success. DR seldom goes beyond the planning stage at most companies, however, until downtime or data loss hit.

Power – Data center power consumption has steadily increased over the past several years, but availability and cost of utility power in the megawatt range is expensive and difficult to obtain.

Cooling -.Approximately half of the power consumed by a data center is required for cooling. At higher power densities the amount of space required for cooling equipment will overtake the number of cabinets a data center can support.

IT as a service – Clients will continue to leverage the compute and storage infrastructure Managed Hosting operators have made large investments in, and derive increased cost savings and benefits by utilizing shared, highly available infrastructure.

About Hosted Solutions

Hosted Solutions’ high quality Data Center and Managed Hosting solutions maintain and protect customers’ mission-critical, back-office IT systems and applications, enabling them to reduce operating costs, lower the risk of downtime, focus on core competencies, and achieve their top business objectives. The company operates four SAS 70 Type II certified Data Centers in Boston, MA, Charlotte, NC, Raleigh, NC and Cary, NC providing best-of-breed data center operations with hardened physical infrastructure, security, and a complete managed services portfolio. For more information visit www.hostedsolutions.com.