India has been ranked as the second most risky location for data centre operations, according to a report. The US has been the most preferred Data Centre location followed by the UK and Sweden, according to annual ‘Dataenter Risk Index 2013’ survey released by Cushman & Wakefield.

India, which has been the leader in mass IT processes with presence of most major IT and ITeS companies, has for the second year, remained at the bottom of the list of preferred Data Centre Location, beating only Brazil which ranked the lowest.

While India ranked high on parameters such as cost of labour (rank 4) and sustainability (rank 6), it ranked moderately on the parameters of political stability (rank 13) and international bandwidth (rank 16).

India, however, scored low on key factors such as energy cost (rank 25) and ease of doing business (rank 30).

Other factors where India lags behind are Natural Disasters (rank 28), Energy Security (rank 28), Corporation Tax (rank 28) and Education Level (rank 28), according to the survey.

Data centres house business-critical IT systems – any downtime has the potential to threaten an organisation’s viability and impact significantly upon revenues and customer services. It help companies to make informed investment decisions about where to locate their data centres to increase efficiency, lower costs and to develop strategies to mitigate anticipated risk.