India, which has emerged as a pre-eminent destination for offshoring of IT and IT-enabled services, is lagging behind when it comes to data centres.

The country’s rank in a 30-country index is as low as 29 for the risks likely to affect successful data centre operations. The Data Centre Risk index, a new indexing started by Cushman and Wakefield, ranks countries based on various risk factors such as energy costs, bandwidth, ease of doing business, cost of labour and political stability.

The Data Centre Risk Index ranks countries according to a number of risk factors that would affect a typical data centre operations. “The Index is designed to assist companies in making strategic investment and operational decisions about where to locate their data,” a Cushman & Wakefield representative said.

It is the North American and European countries that have dominated the list. The US topped the list, followed by the UK, Germany, Iceland and Canada. Some Asian destinations too fared well in the list Qatar occupying the sixth position and Hong Kong seventh. Thailand (15), Singapore (17), Malaysia (19), Japan (20) and China (26) and Indonesia (28) are ahead of India.

Key factors

The main factors that dragged the India’s ranking are cost and availability of energy. Though the overall rank is 29, it secured 30 with regard to ease of doing business and per capita Gross Domestic Product. India, however, fared very well it comes to cost of labour (4), sustainability (6) and political stability (13). The index report predicted that the data centre market in India is expected to grow rapidly in the next five years.

>kurmanath.kanchi@thehindu.co.in

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