With growing awareness about data protection, companies are now developing data recovery software to help organisations protect and recover their mission critical data. Sunil Chandna, CEO, Stellar Information Systems Limited, talks to Biztech2.0 about the data recovery space and the company's expansion roadmap in India.

What according to you are the emerging trends in the data recovery space?

Data recovery is a process, whereby you can save data and files, which are accidentally deleted, eaten by malicious software or viruses, hardware failures, corporate espionage and many more such situations. There are many types of data recovery software to choose from. Software programmers recognise the importance of data files and have been able to create products that demonstrate their understanding of how people accidentally delete or lose important data.

Recovering data from the media can be done by using simple hardware or software, but in the event of a complexity arising, assistance of data recovery specialists might be needed. Software can recover the file allocation table in FAT, master file table and partition table in the NTFS file system. There are software such as data recovery, file recovery, email recovery, safe data eraser and prevent data loss available. With the help of these software, organisations can extract their lost data. In the current scenario, almost all organisations are facing the problem of data loss, either due to human error or some natural disaster.

Could you please explain the various technologies available to recover data? What are the offerings that Stellar Information has in this segment?

With the introduction of new interfaces in the storage segment, it is very difficult for IT managers to protect their data. Rather, it is an evolving challenge for the IT head to protect corporate data. Though they have strong backup and recovery solutions in place, most organisations face the problem of data loss. Thus, organisations are now opting for data recovery software to recover their data.

Data recovery software is now available for various operating systems such as Windows, Linux, Novell, Macintosh and so on. Similarly, file recovery software is now available for Windows File Recovery, Word and Excel Files. Email recovery software is helping organisations recover mailbox standard, mailbox professional and exchange desktop. It is also helping to recover those mails from Outlook Express, which have been deleted.

Trained and experienced engineers, who ensure that one is able to recover lost data accurately and quickly, handle all data recovery cases. We at Stellar provide various kinds of software to help our clients recover their servers, different storage devices, as well as offer safer methods to erase data. We also offer solutions for SOHO and SMB customers, in addition to large enterprises.

How far is your Class 100 Clean Room helping your customers recover their mission critical data?

We have established the Class 100 Clean Room Lab at our Gurgaon facility. The storage devices, which have been corrupted, are brought to the lab. We are the first and the only company in India with a Class 100 Clean Room for data recovery and we adhere to strict procedures to ensure confidentiality of the precious data. We use hundreds of proprietary software and tools for performing data recovery and are backed by a strong in-house research and development team. Our USP is our Class 100 Clean Room facility, where we provide complete security to customers. We follow a chain of custody to maintain security and protect our customers’ data.

You also provide data recovery services in India. What are the challenges that you are facing in India?

We have customers across all verticals, starting from the IT/ITES sectors to manufacturing and telecom. We already have a presence in 12 locations across India and are planning to expand our presence in 8 more cities.

Our data recovery services experts provide services at our customers’ doorsteps. In India with the software, people want the services free of cost. So, during our early years of operation we faced various challenges while offering our services. Earlier, we had focused mainly on our services in India, but now with the change in the entire IT scenario in India we have started offering our products, as well in India.

Though the major revenue contribution comes from the North American market, we see India as a country with great potential. Our target for this year is Rs.30 crores. We are now making strategies that will penetrate the B and C class cities in India. In India the major problem that we faced, was the unavailability of any standard for data destruction. People in India are not recycling data in the proper manner; hence, we are facing a lot of challenges.