Web Host to Ensure a Secure, Reliable Online Experience for Belk.com Customers

01-11-2010- Hosted Solutions, the East Coast’s premier provider of IT infrastructure as a service (IaaS), today announced it has reached an agreement to significantly expand its roster of managed IT services to Belk, the nation’s largest privately-owned mainline department store company.

Belk originally became a client of Hosted Solutions late last year, signing a contract for hosting and managed services to support the company’s updated e-commerce website. The new agreement encompasses several new and expanded e-commerce services for Belk, including database administration and the co-location of its credit and debit card environments.

As part of the agreement, Hosted Solutions will provide IT services to enhance Belk’s gift card program. As part of its business continuity strategy, Belk is co-locating a new IBM Power System server, storage, and SAN fabric that will provide enhanced backup to its primary IT system and critical business functions.

Since the re-launch of Belk.com a year ago, traffic to the site has increased. The company contracted with Hosted Solutions to help it build an even more robust and secure website. Hosted Solutions’ team of “Hi-Touch” experts designed and implemented a comprehensive solution in just two months, expanding Belk’s production environment by 50 percent and substantially increasing the website’s e-commerce capacity as it continues to grow. Hosted Solutions also provided IT backup services for the e-commerce system through use of its five SAS-70, Type II data centers for an increased level of reliability and protection.

“As a result of our relationship with Hosted Solutions, our systems are more secure and our e-commerce site is more robust than ever before,” said Roddy Kerr, Belk Executive Vice President and CIO. “We’ve seen our online sales and traffic increase and anticipate that trend to continue. We want to ensure that our infrastructure can easily handle spikes in traffic and create a consistent user experience for our customers. We value our partnership with Hosted Solutions since it allows us to focus on our core business of serving customers.”

Belk is also deploying Hosted Solutions’ Stratus Trusted Cloud(TM) product to help strengthen its back end IT infrastructure processes such as search indexing, search, and outbound email processing.

“We take great pride in our relationship with Belk,” said Rich Lee, Hosted Solutions’ Founder and Chief Executive Officer. “Given the bond that Belk has built with its customers, it can’t afford to have any issues, from a site performance or security perspective that would place that bond in jeopardy. Knowing that, our team of solution architects custom-designed a system, meeting Belk’s requirements.” Lee noted that more than 80 percent of Hosted Solutions’ customers, like Belk, host their production environments with his firm, providing solid evidence of the higher level of service Hosted Solutions has provided for almost a decade.

Working with Hosted Solutions, Belk has access to a full range of industry-leading IT services, including data protection, information security and virtualization. Hosted Solutions also provides Belk with products from market-leading vendors such as Cisco, EMC, VMware, Oracle, Checkpoint and more.

“We are relying on Hosted Solutions to handle portions of our business-critical functions that require state-of-the-art infrastructure and support,” Kerr said. “Using its services has enabled us to better control our IT capital budget and keep our IT operating expenses at a predictable level.”

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