Data centers are the backbone of social & commercial realities

Data centers are the backbone of our social and commercial realities, and they’re becoming more indispensable by the day. Despite their incredible functionality, however, data centers aren’t invincible. Like any complex system, they can fall prey to an unexpected outage or attack, cyber or otherwise. As we continue to migrate many aspects of our lives to the public cloud, hybrid cloud and even hosted private cloud architectures, the aggregation of so much data in one or several connected facilities becomes an appealing target for a bad actor.

For this reason, it’s essential a thorough end-to-end risk assessment is conducted, information security architectures are appropriately “re-tuned” to address new known risks, and a plan for cyber resiliency is implemented. This helps protect data and minimize damages in the event of an incident. India has been undergoing a massive digital transformation from the past few years.

Surge in internet users, rise of start-ups, fast adoption of cloud computing, Government’s investment in IT are some of the drivers of digital and economic growth in India. Favourable market conditions in India like low cost of internet and data plans, high demand and low supply and a nascent market with limited data center players has shown immense growth potential for the industry. As per a report, the market is expected to reach USD 4 billion by 2024.

The data centre sector in India is witnessing a robust growth in the era of digitisation. With the rapid move towards digitisation, there is an explosion of data in the country and subsequently demand for data centers has peaked. But the cost of building and managing hyperscale data centers is quite high. Hence most organisations today are inclined towards a multi-tenant, hyperscale data center for better manageability, enhanced experience, and to avoid investing resources in managing captive data centers. As the data becomes very complex in nature, the demand for Hyperscale data centers as a phenomenon is gaining popularity worldwide with an annual growth rate of almost 26%. The country has attracted investment from large global data centre operators, cloud service providers, hyperscalers, private equity investors and developers.

Furthermore, the recent announcement by the government to award infrastructure status to data centres will provide access to long-term institutional funds, which will fuel further investments in the sector. This move will provide a huge boost to the fast-evolving digital infrastructure of the country. Cities like Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Chennai are seeing high investments from local and global companies.

Adoption of cloud platforms and related services is expected to continue double-digit growth in 2022 & 2023. As data centers continue to evolve, so does the threat of a damaging cyberattack. Risk assessments are key to understanding where technology is today, not tomorrow.

Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu, President & CEO, VARINDIA