With the speed of business today, data downtime due to natural or man-made disaster is no longer tolerable. That and the more stringent government regulations on data security has led to an explosion of demand in the data protection and recovery field.

[Companies like Woonsocket-based UNICOM are providing data backup solutions and] SafeData LLC, a Warwick-based firm in business since 1995...two years ago shut down its hardware and software sales divisions to focus exclusively on data services.

“We’ve doubled the business in the past year, and we’re about as busy as you could possibly be without having a heart attack,” said Peter Briggs, SafeData’s president.

Lincoln-based Lighthouse Computer Services’ booming data protection business is being driven largely by clients in the banking, accounting and medical industries that need to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley, and other federal laws and regulations...

For local data centers that provide physical storage of their clients’ computer systems, Rhode Island’s size and geographic location offers a strategic advantage...

Many of [Providence-based] HostTech’s clients are from Boston and New York City and want to maintain their computer systems outside their large metro areas but close enough that their engineers can easily travel to their machines...