And what better place to start than, uh, St. Cloud? Actually, the company I’m about to alert you to, Vaultas, is a data center company that’s based in nearby Alexandria, Minnesota. But it just announced plans to expand into the much larger St. Cloud market, increasing its footprint in Central Minnesota. Vaultas develops, owns, and operates vendor-neutral data centers and business continuity/disaster recovery complexes. It has built a secure, high-speed fiber optic network along 1-94 from Minneapolis to Fargo, and plans to build multiple locations along that route. It’s all part of an overall growth strategy, they say, “to empower the state’s business community with affordable, collaborative cloud computing solutions and data center collocation services. ” The company recently completed its Alexandria, Minnesota data center. 
Companies of all sizes are increasing choosing to have their IT systems hosted elsewhere on dedicated servers, or in private or hybrid clouds. So, it’s not surprising to see new data centers popping up in out-state Minnesota. Several well established data center firms in the Twin Cities area have offered a variety of managed IT services and cloud services for years — including Atomic Data, Visi.com, ipHouse, and others — and these firms also serve many out-state customers. But there will always be companies that prefer working with data centers closer to their own locations.
Here’s the press release on the latest announcement from Vaultas:
Vaultas Announces Planned Data Center Expansion into the St. Cloud Market
Minneapolis, Minn.—Oct.31, 2011—Vaultas (www.vaultas.com), a premier provider of collaborative, vendor-neutral data center, collocation and BCDR (Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery) facilities in the Upper Midwest, today announced an expansion plan into the St. Cloud, Minnesota market. Vaultas continues its overall growth strategy, bringing a powerful suite of vendor-neutral collocation, data backup, data storage, cloud services and hosting to Central Minnesota. This follows the completion of the company’s most recent data center facility in Alexandria, Minnesota.
Securing organizations’ mission-critical data assets remains a top priority among CIOs, and recent trends in data center and collocation outsourcing, coupled with overall growth in cloud computing and hosting, demonstrates continued acceptance of data center virtualization technologies. In Forecast: Data Centers, Worldwide, 2010–2015, Gartner is forecasting steadily increasing growth in data storage as more organizations shift from in-house to outsourced facilities. Data loss from either human error or a disaster can be disastrous to any business and is increasingly critical given that 93 percent or firms never recover from such a loss.
Vaultas develops, owns, and operates IT data centers and business continuity and disaster recovery complexes that provide customers with secure, strategically located, private, and semiprivate data center solutions that meet even the most stringent strategic and technical requirements. Vaultas’ vendor-neutral environments reduce TCO (total cost of ownership) for clients through effective use of infrastructure, energy conservation, vendor collaboration, network consolidation and strategic partnering.
“Our expansion into the St. Cloud market is a key milestone for Vaultas, expanding our footprint in Central Minnesota and further empowering our customers with flexible data center and cloud computing solutions that scale to meet their requirements,” said Vaultas President John Unger. “Our mission is to bring the St. Cloud business community collaborative, affordable security solutions to defend their data and ease operating expenses. At Vaultas, we deliver best-in-class services for primary data center and collocation, website, and business application hosting; ultra-high-speed bandwidth, data backup, and recovery solutions.”
Note: Vaultas was on-site today to meet the local business community at the St. Cloud Chamber Technology and Education Conference, offering free data center and networking consultation to attendees.