A new census puts the Raleigh-Cary area as the fastest growing metro area in the nation for the past year, and some businesses said it's a good place to be.

The Raleigh-Cary metropolitan area population increased by 4.3 percent between July 2007 and July 2008 and the Census Bureaus estimates the total population at 1.1 million.

Six months ago Joe Garcia moved his restaurant "Mama Mia's" south.

"Ah, the people, the diversity and just you know it's got a good feel to it," Garcia said.

Gordon Krueger moved from Michigan, and many of his customers are also transplants to the area.

"It's a good place to live," Krueger said.

Krueger and his friends, Robert Wiggins from Vermont and Ryan Wiitala from Michigan, all work at Research Triangle Park.

"That was pretty much 100 percent what brought me here, was job opportunity," Wiitala said.

"I would say predominantly most of the people I work with are not from North Carolina," Wiggins said.

One attraction to the Raleigh-Cary area is that companies like SAS in Cary are expanding despite the economy. SAS is in the midst of building an executive briefing center and planning a $70 million dollar advanced cloud computing facility. Cloud computing is basically a virtual hard drive you can access from any computer. Building and designing the facility will create and estimated 1,000 jobs according to company representatives. SAS Senior Vice President Jim Davis said it will help SAS grow.

"It's going to support quite a bit of new business for SAS," Davis said.

Davis said good colleges and universities are one reason the area has a solid business climate.

"So in terms of being able to draw in talent, it's perfect," Davis said.

Infrastructure, he explained, is also a big draw.

"It's a high tech environment. It's a lot easier to build and start a company here and sustain it," Davis said.

And while growth has provided opportunity, some like Ryan Wiitala hope not everyone learns the secret.

"I would just hate to see it get over populated," Wiitala said.