AmeriVault says it has more than 500 customers and 2,000 virtual private network connections as well as eight data centers around the U.S. where it hosts storage and other IT services. It says business has grown at least 25 percent each year since it opened six years ago.

Another online backup provider, LiveVault in Marlboro, Mass., claims that its revenue grew the equivalent of 226 percent year over year for the third quarter of 2004. Spokesman Jim McManus says the amount of new data the company took on during the past quarter alone exceeded what it projected for the first two years it offered the service. LiveVault claims to manage more than 1 petabyte of data.

But despite the apparent growth in the popularity of SSPs, switching to a service provider doesn't always make an IT manager's life easier. Managing a service provider relationship "does not always reduce the amount of work one has," says Berlitz's Power. "There's still effort to coordinate those services, and it's not insubstantial."

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