India's data centre industry has witnessed significant growth in recent years, driven by rising cloud adoption, increasing artificial intelligence workloads, data localisation requirements and the expansion of Global Capability Centres (GCCs). Global and domestic companies are expected to invest more than $50 billion in India's data centre ecosystem over the next five to seven years.
Mohith Mohan, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Moar Advisory, a Bengaluru-based technology advisory and consulting firm, said India's data centre market is projected to more than double over the coming years because of artificial intelligence workloads, cloud adoption, digital public infrastructure and enterprise digital transformation. He said the immediate challenge has been meeting growing demand, but resilience has now become equally important.
According to Mohan, customers are no longer evaluating data centre providers solely on capacity, latency or cost. He said company boards are increasingly focusing on operational continuity, cyber resilience, disaster recovery capabilities and the speed at which critical services can be restored after disruptions.
Raghu Pareddy, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Wissen Technology, an information technology consulting and digital engineering services company, said resilience is rapidly emerging as a competitive advantage rather than merely an operational necessity. He noted that organisations now recognise that business continuity, customer trust and regulatory confidence depend as much on resilience as they do on infrastructure scale.
Although the recent disruption was triggered by a fire, industry experts believe the sector faces a much wider range of interconnected risks, including power outages, cyberattacks, cooling failures, flooding, extreme weather conditions, human error and supply chain disruptions.
Mohan said the primary concern today extends beyond fire hazards to power resilience. He explained that artificial intelligence workloads require significantly higher power densities, making uninterrupted electricity supply, grid stability and reliable backup power systems strategic priorities. He warned that prolonged power disruptions could simultaneously affect thousands of workloads, making energy resilience essential for digital infrastructure.
Experts also emphasised that disaster preparedness involves much more than installing fire suppression systems. Mohan said international best practices are based on the principle that no individual safeguard should become a single point of failure.
He explained that resilient infrastructure is supported through multiple layers of protection, including disaster recovery systems, business continuity planning, geographically distributed facilities, redundant power and cooling systems, multiple network routes, cyber resilience measures, continuous infrastructure monitoring and clearly defined incident response protocols.
Mohan further stated that governance has become as important as physical infrastructure. He said international standards such as Telecommunications Infrastructure Standard 942 (TIA-942) increasingly emphasise regular scenario-based exercises, independent audits, crisis communication protocols and continuous improvement. He added that disaster preparedness is no longer regarded as an annual compliance exercise but as an ongoing organisational capability that evolves with emerging risks.
Pareddy said regular testing remains one of the most critical aspects of resilience. He explained that testing practices vary considerably across organisations, with advanced companies and global cloud providers conducting disaster recovery validation several times each year, while others perform testing only to satisfy compliance requirements. He stressed that a recovery plan is only as effective as its most recent successful test.
Industry experts also highlighted concerns over geographic concentration. Despite India's rapidly expanding installed data centre capacity, a substantial portion remains concentrated in Mumbai, Chennai and the Delhi-National Capital Region.
Mohan said many enterprises continue to rely on active-passive disaster recovery architectures, under which backup infrastructure becomes operational only after an outage, instead of adopting active-active deployments that distribute workloads across multiple regions in real time.
Pareddy added that many organisations continue selecting disaster recovery sites primarily on the basis of performance and cost, frequently locating backup infrastructure within the same region as the primary facility. He said the next stage in the evolution of India's data centre industry will require multi-region strategies capable of maintaining business continuity even if an entire region is affected.
Experts also believe India's regulatory framework must continue evolving beyond engineering compliance. While regulations have strengthened considerably over the past decade and many leading operators voluntarily follow international standards and operational resilience frameworks, they argue that future regulations should focus more extensively on resilience assurance.
Mohan said the next logical step would be introducing periodic independent resilience audits for mission-critical data centres. He stated that such assessments should evaluate not only fire safety systems but also disaster recovery preparedness, business continuity testing and overall operational readiness. He compared resilience assurance to cybersecurity assessments, saying it should become a recurring governance requirement rather than a one-time certification exercise.
Pareddy emphasised that resilience is a shared responsibility. He said one of the biggest misconceptions is that resilience depends entirely on infrastructure providers, whereas independent audits, industry certification, enterprise governance and regulatory oversight all play essential roles.
As India accelerates the adoption of artificial intelligence, cloud computing and the expansion of Global Capability Centres, industry experts believe resilience will increasingly determine the country's digital competitiveness.
Mohan concluded that the organisations which earn long-term trust will not necessarily be those that prevent every disruption, but those that recover quickly, communicate transparently and continuously strengthen their resilience capabilities.
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