Data centers serve as specialized operations centers that provide organizations with the ability to manage and analyze massive quantities of data that are necessary to support their operations. Data centers have been developed to support the increased demand for IT services, which is largely due to security concerns related to the transfer of large volumes of data over the Internet and the increased use of remote devices for business purposes. Data centers have been built with the concept of centralizing IT infrastructure as a means to improve security, control and increase productivity, and provide scalable resources to meet the needs of organizations. However, increasing the capacity of a data center presents a number of potential problems for organizations including incorrect installation of hardware and improper wiring of the data center. In response to the unique challenges that organizations face in successfully completing data center expansions, Microsoft provides a tool called Bootstrap Lite (BSL) that is designed to provide assurance that the configuration of hardware and racks meet established design specifications thus, improving both reliability and efficiency, while reducing error rates and increasing the time required to build out a data center. Various considerations are required when planning for data center expansions including the following considerations: Scale of the data center, power and cooling needs of the data center, security requirements of the data center, network connectivity to the data center, environmental sustainability of the data center operations, regulatory compliance of the data center, disaster recovery options associated with the data center, redundancy of the data center, and extensive hardware testing of the data center. In addition, BSL supports organizations in maintaining high levels of performance and reliability for their data centers, providing assurance that data centers will remain secure and adaptable to the changing needs of the organization in the digital economy.