disaster recovery

Filed in archive Technology , Venture Capital on October 24, 2003

I recently just wondered about why so few startups have ventured into disaster recovery, which was once coined as a very stable segment of growth. Especially after the power outages in the last months. I had to withstand the flooding of newtron's data centers in 2002. Luckily we had enough backups of our facilities, but otherwise all data could have been lost in just a second.

Disaster recovery--investing in what if--has always been a hard sell.

"A survey, sponsored by EMC, found that only 14 percent of senior business executives felt their important data is very vulnerable to being lost in the event of a disaster, compared to 52 percent of senior IT executives."

I could only find some start-ups. Advanticom received an investment in 2001, but went bust meanwhile. In 2003 Topio could convince Sequoia Capital to invest $10 mio. in their operations. But besides that I wasn't able to find investments in disaster recovery companies. Are they just easier funded by cash flow or is the marketplace just filled with enough mature companies with broad product offerings?