is another company that plans to continue building data centers. The communications and managed service provider processes around 7 billion voice minutes a year and has data centers in the U.S., the U.K., Singapore and India, its home country. It's planning to construct new facilities in South Africa and China, says Abid Qadiri, vice president of data center services for the company.

The economic downturn has caused many companies to focus on cutting the costs of managing their data, making outsourcing attractive, he says.

"The current environment, looking at it from the cost perspective, has actually increased the ," Qadiri says. "Companies are asking questions that they might not have normally asked. Such as, 'Are data centers our business?'"

Tata Communications currently has data center facilities taking up almost 1 million square feet of space, and plans to invest more than $2 billion to expand their capabilities to serve customers' data requirements.

, says IDC's Pucciarelli. While CIOs are tasked with maintaining the same level of IT service at a reduced overhead, many chief financial officers are less than enamored of outsourcing as the solution. Their three top concerns are continuity, security and value, and not all are adequately addressed by outsourcing, the analyst says.