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DuPont&MOrgan Awards American Internet Services SAS 70 Type II Audit Certification

(Jan 31, 2008)-- “We have always had the utmost confidence that all of our controls and procedures in place are operating at the strict standards we’ve set.” said Alessandra Carrasco, COO and executive vice president at AIS after it received SAS 70 Typr II audit certification.

“Our primary service priority is to maintain the best security, at every level and function of our colocation facilities. This certification guarantees that our services are exceptional – secure, precise, and fully compliant with regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley.” he continued.

American Internet Services (AIS) colocation facilities have received SAS 70 Type II audit certification from independent auditing firm DuPont & Morgan, LLP. SAS 70 certification is an internationally-recognized standard which reviews all levels of information technology service providers for exceptional business practices, communication, internal procedures, and security.

The Type II certification is achieved through monitoring the data center’s activities over a six-month period and reiterates, according to COO Alessandra Carrasco, AIS’s commitment to “strict standards … so that all of our services are 100% functional and secure.”

DuPont & Morgan, based in Nashville, Tenn., is a premier CPA and independent auditing firm which specializes in SAS 70 audits for technology providers. Statement on Auditing Standards (SAS) 70 is an auditing standard created by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants that applies specifically to service organizations. SAS 70 is a field audit, and for the Type II review, DuPont & Morgan auditors spent six months, July through December, on-site investigating American Internet Services. Auditors went through almost 190 different control, or policy, areas, from physical security to accounting practices.Its emphasis on information technology and security makes the SAS 70 certification an important priority for AIS.

This audit certification is increasingly popular with information technology service providers – including data centers and colocation facilities, data storage facilities, and hosting providers – because businesses outsource many IT services and need an in-depth and reliable way to verify the service quality.

SAS 70 audits look for five major areas:
• Customer communication practices
• Internal procedures, corporate ethics, and defined workplace codes
• Internal monitoring and oversight
• Control activities, meaning the management policies in place at every level of the company
• Overall organizational attitude

For IT providers, this audit also focuses on safeguards for how customer data and records are handled, focusing on:
• Data security and integrity
• Physical security
• Design, development, and change cycles for hardware and software systems
• Records maintenance
• Client and customer policies

With this latest audit, AIS’s San Diego Tech Center facility is certified for another year as a suitable IT services provider for any Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA compliant organization. “As the completion of this independent audit shows,” emphasizes Carrasco, “the services that our customers entrust with AIS are 100% functional and secure.”

The full, 150-page SAS 70 report will be released at the end of January 2008. The audit report will detail all of AIS’s control activities and include the full auditor’s findings.

AIS has been providing state-of-the-art colocation and data center solutions for a variety of industries, including leading financial institutions, credit card companies, government contractors, IT outsourcing providers, pharmaceuticals manufacturers, and online entertainment and gaming companies, among others. AIS also serves a broad range of small and medium-sized business customers.

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