Is India's data centre boom keeping pace with disaster preparedness?

The Tata data centre fire has shifted the focus from building capacity to ensuring resilience as India's digital infrastructure scales up

  The fire at Tata Communications' data centre in Delhi last week, which disrupted services for customers and affected connectivity for some cloud users, has put the spotlight on an often-overlooked aspect of India's digital transformation: disaster preparedness.

 

As India races to build more data centres to support artificial intelligence (AI) models, cloud computing, digital public infrastructure and enterprise digitisation, industry experts say the conversation is gradually shifting from how quickly facilities can be built to how resilient they are when disruptions occur.

 

India's data centre boom

 

India's data centre industry has expanded rapidly over the past few years, fuelled by rising cloud adoption, AI workloads, data localisation requirements and the growth of Global Capability Centres (GCCs). Global and domestic companies are planning to invest more than $50 billion in India's data centre ecosystem over the next five to seven years.

   

"India's data centre market is projected to more than double over the next few years, driven by AI workloads, cloud adoption, digital public infrastructure and enterprise digital transformation. The immediate challenge has been keeping pace with demand," said Mohith Mohan, founder and CEO of Moar Advisory, a Bengaluru-based technology advisory and consulting firm. "However, resilience is now becoming just as important."

 

He shared that customers are no longer evaluating providers solely on capacity, latency or cost. "Boards are asking broader questions around operational continuity, cyber resilience, disaster recovery capabilities and how quickly critical services can be restored following disruptions," he said.

 

Raghu Pareddy, CEO and founder of Wissen Technology, an IT consulting and digital engineering services firm, said that resilience is increasingly becoming a competitive differentiator rather than simply an operational requirement, as organisations recognise that business continuity, customer trust and regulatory confidence depend as much on resilience as they do on scale.

 

What are the biggest risks?

 

Although fire triggered the latest incident, experts believe the sector faces a much broader set of interconnected risks.

 

These include:

 

• Fire
• Power outages
• Cyberattacks
• Cooling failures
• Flooding and extreme weather
• Human error
• Supply chain disruptions

 

According to Mohan, the biggest concern today is no longer fire alone but power resilience. "As AI workloads drive significantly higher power densities, operators are increasingly focused on ensuring uninterrupted access to reliable electricity, grid stability and backup power systems. A prolonged power disruption has the potential to impact thousands of workloads simultaneously, making energy resilience a strategic priority rather than simply an operational one."

 

Disaster preparedness goes beyond fire safety

 

While the recent Tata data centre fire has drawn attention to physical infrastructure, experts say disaster preparedness extends far beyond installing fire suppression systems.

 

"Globally, disaster preparedness is built on the principle that no single control should become a single point of failure," Mohan told Business Standard.

 

In practice, he said, resilience is built through multiple layers of protection, including disaster recovery (DR), business continuity planning (BCP), geographically distributed facilities, redundant power and cooling systems, multiple network routes, cyber resilience, continuous infrastructure monitoring, and clearly defined incident response protocols.

 

Mohan added that governance has become just as critical as infrastructure. "International frameworks such as Telecommunications Infrastructure Standard 942 (TIA-942) increasingly emphasise regular scenario-based exercises, independent audits, crisis communication protocols and continuous improvement. Disaster preparedness is no longer viewed as an annual compliance activity but as an ongoing organisational capability that evolves alongside changing risks," he said.

 

Regular testing is another crucial element of resilience, according to Pareddy. "Testing varies significantly across organisations. Advanced companies and global cloud vendors validate their disaster recovery capabilities several times a year, while others do so only to meet compliance requirements. A recovery plan is only as effective as its most recent successful test," he said.

 

Is current geographic redundancy enough?

 

Another issue experts highlighted is geographic concentration. Although India's installed data centre capacity continues to grow rapidly, a significant share remains clustered across Mumbai, Chennai and the Delhi-NCR region.

 

Mohan said many enterprises still rely on active-passive disaster recovery architectures, where backup infrastructure is activated only after an outage, instead of active-active deployments that distribute workloads across multiple regions in real time.

 

Pareddy added that many organisations continue to choose disaster recovery sites based primarily on performance and cost, often placing backup infrastructure within the same region as their primary facility. "The next stage of maturity of the Indian data centre industry lies in multi-region strategies that ensure business continuity even when an entire region is impacted," he said.

 

Do regulations need to evolve?

 

India's regulatory framework for data centres has strengthened over the past decade, while many leading operators voluntarily align with international standards and operational resilience frameworks. However, experts believe regulation should now move beyond engineering compliance.

 

Mohan said the next logical step would be periodic independent resilience audits for mission-critical data centres. "These should cover not just fire safety systems but also disaster recovery preparedness, business continuity testing and operational readiness. Much like cybersecurity assessments have become standard practice, resilience assurance should become a recurring governance requirement rather than a one-time certification exercise," he said.

 

Pareddy stressed that resilience is a shared responsibility. "One of the biggest misconceptions is that resilience lies entirely with the infrastructure provider. Independent audits, industry certification, enterprise governance and regulatory oversight all have an important role to play," he said.

 

Building trust in India's digital infrastructure

 

As India accelerates AI adoption, cloud computing and the expansion of GCCs, experts believe resilience will increasingly define the country's digital competitiveness.

 

"The organisations that build long-term trust will not necessarily be those that avoid every disruption, but those that recover quickly, communicate transparently and continuously strengthen their resilience capabilities," said Mohan.