The Hindu Business Line : Disaster recovery goes hybrid, market set to grow rapidly

As per IDC predictions for the Asia-Pacific, the disaster recovery market will grow from $551 million in 2001 to exceed $1.3 billion by 2006. This growth will be fuelled by the region's healthy demand for services that guarantee business continuity.

Hyderabad , July 12

THE disaster recovery market is growing rapidly in the region with new models of services evolving encompassing in-house solutions to now trendy outsourced approach and a combination of both of these offered as a hybrid model.

The Managing Director of Comsat Max, Mr Sudipta Sen, told Business Line that the banking financial services sector, the software and ITES companies and lately manufacturing and retail segments are driving the growth of the DR market in the country. Significantly, companies have realised that disaster management and recovery are more than incidental IT expenses.

"While DR management has its origins in 1990s, when firms were preparing for the Y2K bug, this has lately assumed significant role with leading auditors insisting on its implementation, particularly when the companies are dispersed," Mr Sen said.

According to findings of Gartner Research "Two out of every five enterprises who experience a disaster go out of business within five years." This is significant given the current day business demands. As enterprises embrace take to integrated technology solutions, any outage can possibly bring the complete business process to a grinding halt. Hence, it has become imperative to have an appropriate Disaster Recovery plan to take care of such exigencies, Mr Sen said.

As per IDC predictions for the Asia-Pacific, the DR market will grow from $551 million in 2001 to exceed $1.3 billion by 2006. This growth will be fuelled by the region's healthy demand for services that guarantee business continuity.

IDC estimates India and China to be the two biggest markets with a CAGR of 46 per cent and 36 per cent respectively over the next 5 years.

"For BFSI sector, the complexity of huge amount of data they generate is an enormous management challenge. Large banks have millions of customers spread across the country who carry out daily transactions. Customers expect and demand 24X7 availability of these applications at all times. Oil and natural gas companies like BPCL and ONGC have gone in for large DR implementations too," Mr Sen said.

"In India, lately an increase in the level of competition and market demands, together with increased dependence on technology for core business processes has necessitated the need for DR by companies. Another sector, which has grown tremendously, is the software and ITES sector. The latter, particularly depends on the volume of calls and the access to records on a 24X7 basis. Any downtime could be detrimental to their business. Most of the top business houses today have an alternate site, which replicates their data centre," he said.

As corporate networks get complex and data capture and storage become challenging, the industry is bound to see a shift towards replication of critical resources, business applications and processes. DR as a networking solution, although new at this point of time, will become routine for corporates in near future, Mr Sen said.