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Ever suffered the agony of losing precious data from your laptop or desktop? Individuals are not the only ones undergoing the ordeal, but corporates are also waking up to the threat.

Computer viruses may be revered as the epitome of data loss but human error most often causes the problem. Accidental formatting, file or folder deletion, dropped hard drive are some of human errors that cause data loss. Not just this, in these cases data recovery becomes all the more complex.

Interestingly, user’s nightmare is fast transforming into bountiful of business opportunities for a growing tribe of data recovery players. While the data recovery from disk is a fragmented market today, bigger players like Symantec, Trend Micro and Websense are eyeing the data loss prevention and data leakage prevention market. The market is clearly seeing a high level of activity. Symantec, for instance, has paid $350 million to purchase data leak prevention vendor Vontu, making it the latest security vendor to enter this new, but crowded market.

The government is arming itself to handle the loss of sensitive data. Prime Minister’s office, ISRO, Army headquarters, various ministries and public sector undertakings (PSU), have deployed tools to this effect. The security and law enforcement agencies are using data recovery services to investigate cases, wherein criminals have been intelligent enough to wipe off possible traces of their electronic heist.

Not to forget corporate biggies like

Air-India, Hindustan Lever, Siemens, Ranbaxy, Hyundai India and State Bank of India, who are joining the fast-growing list of adopters. Prominent among them are airline reservation systems, ecommerce portals and financial transactions between banks. Loss of data in all such cases can be fatal to businesses, since their revenue streams and their survival depends almost entirely on data.

Here again, Indian businesses have come to realise the seriousness of this issue and are beginning to do their bit. So much so, that large enterprises have started building the data loss prevention factor as an integral element in their annual maintenance contracts or service level agreements with IT service companies.

With egovernance perlocating down to tehsil and village levels, data on various citizen services is in high demand. Considering this, it has become relevant even for public offices to adopt appropriate measures for prevention of data loss.