09 July 2009

Mauritius launches bid as International Centre for Back-Up, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Services

The Board of Investment, Mauritius has launched a bid to establish itself as an international centre for back-up, disaster recovery and business continuity services. It has appointed consulting firm BroadGroup as advisors on its data centre strategy, and also as producers of a special 2-day conference for enterprise CIOs, IT directors and senior Data Centre managers and investors

The export-oriented IT-BPO sector in Mauritius contributes to 4% of Gross Domestic Product with 258 operators employing 10,400 people. The sector will continue to grow in 2009 by about 20% with both new entrants as well as expansion of the activities of existing operators. The global economic crisis, instead of being a threat to the sector, is being seen as an opportunity as companies in countries which are severely hit by the global downturn need to restructure their processes and turn to low-cost destinations to maintain a competitive edge.

“Mauritius is ideally positioned at the crossroads of Africa, Asia and Australia and outside major earthquake ridges,” commented Philip Low, managing director at BroadGroup. “The island is also well known as a major financial and infocom hub. Being relatively remote but well-connected to the world is a major attribute for the island-nation to position itself as a disaster recovery and business continuity destination.”

Mauritius is connected to the SAFE/SAT3/W3C international fibre optic cable networks, and a further link is envisaged to the SEACOM/EaSSy cable which will link Southern and Eastern Africa to Europe and India, by mid 2010.

In this context, Mauritius will host the Internet Data Centre Conference which will take place September 30 – October 1 2009, to connect local operators with potential partners. The event will also act as a showcase to position Mauritius as the next emerging data hosting and business continuity destination, which is increasingly recognized as a bilingual, high-quality destination with cost per seat comparable with India, Philippines and Egypt.

The possibility of solving the cooling issues which the data centre industry is facing at the moment through the use of sea-water air-conditioning in a dedicated eco-park will also be presented in the conference.

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