Anand Naik, Director, Systems Engineering, Symantec Corporation in his presentation about the findings have even suggested that data recovery should be a part of overall governance framework and not individual to the companies.

'Companies still find that hardware and software failures are the biggest causes of unplanned downtime' the survey report said. "The study indicates the trend in data centre management in the coming financial year. Company heads can then plan their strategy with respect to data centre management based on this report," said Kerman Kasad, head, corporate communications, Symantec Corporation.

Commenting on this, Deepak Shikarpur, Chairman, IT Committee, Mahratta Chamber of Commerce, Industries and Agriculture (MCCIA) said that India is gradually turning into a destination for data centres, where companies are in compliance with BS 7799 security standard by British Standards Institute. "However, it is a gradual change and there has to penalty for IT companies that do not have foolproof data security plan," he said.

Another important finding of the study is that staffing in data centres is a big issue. Forty one percent employees reported that their data centres were understaffed –probably because finding qualified applicants is a huge problem, said 52 percent respondents. In addition, 75 percent felt that skills of data center employees did not match the needs of their position, while 61 percent also cited that retaining data center employees was a big problem.

The study states that in order to overcome this staffing problem, many companies are depending on outsourcing and training. About 33 percent of companies said they have outsourced their work and the primary driver for outsourcing is to increase the staff's access to specialized skills. Training is seen as strategic by 77percent of the respondents, with 91 percent expecting training budgets to rise or stay constant over the next two years,' the report cited.