Critical data centers, a hallmark of the financial services industry, are being built or leased by untraditional industries, including hospitals and insurance agencies. This command center, designed by Boston-based Integrated Design Group, controls a major financial services data operation in New Jersey.

Critical data centers – buildings teeming with generators, lines of cables and rows of air conditioners the size of conference tables, all ensuring business continuity no matter what Mother Nature throws at them – are not solely the domain of the financial services industry. Hospitals, insurance companies and even the occasional university are coveting such support systems as well.

“It’s almost becoming common – everyone’s asking the same questions,” said Gary Murphy, principal of Boston-based Integrated Design Group. “Some industries are ahead of the curve but other groups are catching up.”

It’s not just the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that are making people nervous. Last summer’s massive blackout and Hurricane Isabel’s devastating effects along the South and mid-Atlantic coasts proved to many that, for the sake of business continuity, data must be backed up in at least one separate location.

“Everyone’s scared now that any single site will go off line,” said Kirby Wadsworth, vice president of marketing and business development for Revivio, a Lexington-based startup company that developed the Continuous Protection System. The new technology gives companies the ability to recover previous data from any point in time. “What’s become clear is that they’re going to be hit with something that will cause them to lose data, whether that’s [because of] a virus or a software upgrade. [Adverse conditions once considered rare] are now routinely blowing up,” he said.

Industry watchers say that more companies are building their own data centers or leasing space at facilities that already exist for the purpose.

“The reason this trend is going up is that people need to keep their businesses running – they can’t afford the down time,” said Brent Biernat, assistant vice president for Network Services in Avon, Conn. Network Services develops and supports technology for the financial services industry.

Critical data centers ensure that business doesn’t stop for a second. Given the quickness with which Uninterruptable Power Suppliers jump to life, no one notices a lapse. UPS machines are much quicker than a generator, obliterating that telltale flicker of lights between a power outage and resumption of electricity. Critical data center sites, for security reasons, are often confidential. A layout of the system resembles a family tree, with multiple lines connecting each piece of equipment, providing nearly fail-safe redundancy. Typically, highly critical data centers consist of two separate UPS systems, two utility feeds and two separate cooling plants backed by redundant generators. A large-scale empty data center equipped to handle high-level redundancy typically would cost between $300 and $500 per square foot to build – about double the price of an office building, according to principals at Boston’s Integrated Design Group.

Initially, the government drove the critical data center business, with backup systems built for the Internal Revenue Service, FBI and the military. The idea soon caught on in the private sector, however, particularly in the financial services industry.

“Any shutdown of a data center costs financial groups millions of dollars a minute,” said Tony Asfour, principal and project manager at Integrated Design Group.

Critical data centers became a staple in the financial services industry and are now being pursued by other industries as well, particularly hospitals. Industry watchers say that hospitals are moving into the field partly because of the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, which requires that all hospitals establish business continuity and disaster recovery plans by an April 2005 deadline. But Marcy Smith, marketing associate at CentrePath in Waltham, said there’s a larger reason – a growing reliance on high-tech programs for patient care.

No ‘Paper Exercise’

Picture Archiving Communication Systems and teleradiology are becoming standard practices in many hospitals. PACS, which incorporate digital communication through the processing and viewing of images, provides hospital staff with unlimited access to electronic patient information. For example, doctors can view x-rays on a computer screen rather than carrying around the carbon copies.

Health care organizations are instituting large-scale technology upgrades to meet other HIPAA regulations as well, all of which are intended to make medical records more accurate and accessible. According to CentrePath, clinicians treat patients without access to previous records at least one-third of the time – and even when the paper files are available they are often incomplete or illegible. To increase accuracy, uniformity and accessibility, hospitals are adopting computer-based patient record systems, transferring paper records into computer form. The increasing dependence of hospitals on computer-generated data demands that systems never fail. The critical data centers, with their multiple sources of power and suppliers, are the becoming the backbone of hospital infrastructure.

“The term ‘business continuity,’ a catch-phrase, signifies a situation where financial companies absolutely cannot have their servers go down. It’s the same with health care where you’re dealing with patient information,” Smith said. “Not every hospital has it yet but it’s absolutely a trend.”

The critical data industry has changed dramatically over the past 10 years – at one point, the centers were so cost-intensive that only the largest financial services firms could afford them, said Joe Lockwood, chief technology officer of COCC. With the price of technology declining, it now has became easier for smaller financial companies to build their own centers.

“These days, most [financial services firms] have business continuity and it will work – at one point it was just a paper exercise,” Lockwood said. “Nowadays, it’s a reality.

“Other industries that are closest to it are [part of] the Fortune 1000. They are comparable to the financial services industry in their size and that they have multiple facilities all over the country. That means that they can deploy business continuity solutions in a more cost-effective manner.”

Some industry watchers already see evidence of insurance companies and universities establishing, or leasing, space for data centers. Lockwood predicts that large retailers won’t be too far behind.

“The financial services industry is the most advanced industry when it comes to business continuity and it’s starting to spread,” Lockwood said. “Other businesses are moving that way but it’s a slow and steady process, it’s not [going to happen] overnight.”