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"Organizations have different sensitivities to data protection"
Sunil Chandna,
CEO,
Stellar Information Systems Ltd.
 From a niche Rs 5-crore entity just five years back, Stellar Information Systems has today grown into a Rs 20-crore pan-India data recovery and protection organization. Aiming to gross Rs 25 crore revenue in the year ending March 2009, Stellar, whose clients in India include Suzlon, Siemens, L&T, and IndusInd Bank, has set its sights on overseas expansion. In this exclusive interview, Chandna speaks to Senior Associate Editor Sanjay Gupta about enterprise data recovery trends and issues.
How is Stellar’s business organized?
We have divided our business into three strategic units: one is data recovery services under which we have 12 labs located across India; another is online data recovery tools (we have about 25 tools, the largest number of data recovery tools from a single source anywhere in the world); and the third is data protection tools for PCs and servers that help back up data and prevent unplanned data losses or disk failures.
What is the typical profile of your customers?
Our Phoenix brand of data recovery products are used by about 50,000 users in the US, including the US Army, NASA, Department of Energy and Microsoft. Our products are used by a diverse set of customers, including college students, home office owners, Web hosting providers, CEOs of companies or corporates in different verticals. Also, our data recovery tools and bundles are used by the technicians of many data recovery solutions providers. About 184 data recovery companies are our customers worldwide. We also have file recovery tools for MS Office suite of applications as well as for Outlook and Outlook Express.
You’ve recently upgraded your Class 100 clean room for hard disk data recovery. What is the significance of this move?
What the clean room has is core infrastructure with controlled heat, humidity and temperature. This is essential to opening a hard drive and do a head transplant that is mandatory [for recovering data], because if you don’t do it, the disk will crash and become irreparable. This is much more serious than somebody opening up a drive and trying things out in a normal environment. Besides, we have to stock huge inventories of hard drive parts because, for matching a head transplant, you have to look at the same batch of hard drives rather than just the same brand name or capacity. For that reason, we manage an inventory of about 15,000 hard drives. We are setting up a larger facility where you can do eight simultaneous data recovery jobs.
You have just released a product called Stellar Wipe. How does it work and what benefits does a company get?
A lot of companies face high employee turnovers and they need to hand over the computers to people who join in place of the exiting employees. What companies typically do is just format the hard drive and give the machines over. But a simple format does not ensure the safety of confidential data because it can be recovered. This can pose potential threats to any company that sells its computers or even in case where the new employee gets unauthorized access to the old data. To prevent such incidents, Stellar Wipe securely removes data from the disk without leaving any traces or trails. So companies can safely reuse or sell their old systems.
In the US our file eraser tools are already in use, which are an equivalent of paper shredding machines but they work in a digital environment. There are different US and other country standards for data destruction and our products comply with most of them. We see a big potential for this business because, until now, many companies were using degaussers which render all magnetic storage media useless and are expensive to install and maintain. But with our data eraser tools, they can maintain security and reuse the disks as well at much lower costs.
Are these tools relatively more useful to enterprises in certain segments?
Companies in the outsourcing sector have to maintain confidentiality of client and customer data, besides complying with provisions like Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA – so they will find the tools quite useful. The BFSI segment is another key potential user for these tools.
How do your solutions fit in cases where a company already has redundant storage and backup tools?
Due to lack of backup policies, large inorganic growth or other technical reasons, data loss can still occur. Our solutions sit one level before data collection and one level beyond data loss.
What trends do you foresee amongst Indian corporates as far as data recovery and protection is concerned?
Over the past few years a significant change has happened: the huge growth of data, whether it’s in PowerPoint presentations or audio and video files. So the moment data grows, it becomes more difficult to manage. Also, as the disk capacities go up, the density of media increases exponentially, but the MTBF (mean time between failure) of drives manufactured today has reduced greatly compared to the MTBF, say, five years ago. So the drives are much more prone to problems. And if companies are not backing up the data on their drives properly, they are more likely to face data disasters. Another factor that will create demand for more data protection services is that data is constantly being stored and moved across a variety of platforms – hard disks, flash drives, tapes, DV recorders, digital cameras and others. Increasingly, there are more chances than ever of data getting corrupted or lost when it is being stored or transferred from one device to another.
Why do most of third-party service providers format disks in case of errors or problems rather than recover data or repair them?
That’s because it’s an expense for them and quite often, this cost is not built into the contract they have with the user organization. It also has to do with how critical is the need to recover that data and whether the organization or person can do without it. Often, if the organization has a backup policy and the individual whose disk has crashed hasn’t followed it, the IT head may question that person as to why the backup was not taken. We even see cases where a person bears the cost of recovery individually because they do not want to get into an embarrassing situation before their manager or department head.
In your experience, are companies reactive or proactive in their data protection approach?
There are companies that have consistently seen data loss several times over many years – but they have accepted it as a part of life and are okay with having a strong vendor for data recovery to turn to. This is primarily because a lot of data backup and protection requires human interaction in terms of adhering to the backup or loss-prevention policy guidelines set by the heads of IT departments.
However, companies in segments such as BFSI are more proactive because data is much more critical to their operations. We have been in touch with CISOs (chief information security officers) and other IT heads in various segments among our customer base and they have been very receptive to proactively deploying data protection and recovery solutions. Different organizations have different sensitivities; some even look at snazzier machines or displays as a better way to spend their money than in data protection tools!
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