In the world of finance, investments are regularly measured by performance. If an investment isn't making money, the basic rule is make a change, and quickly. Consider a stock purchased for a dollar. If you bought that stock, and it became obvious that the value was going down rather than up, you can pick up the phone and call your broker to make a change. Actually, even this is considered a slow method by today's standards - it's possible to automate those changes to within minutes with computers and the Internet. If we turn the spotlight on the data center, couldn't the argument be made that it's simply a collection of assets, too? Why, then, is time measured in days or weeks instead of hours or minutes when it comes to making asset changes inside of the data center?

Industry Reality
Most mid-size and large organizations have current or future IT initiatives that involve leveraging those data center assets in some way either to help make the organization more risk-averse or to enable the organization to produce more product and potentially more margin. Three examples that come to mind immediately are business continuity, test and development, and on-demand computing. Ultimately, the road to change in the data center revolves around two key principles - at what point will you be able to recover your data, and how long will it take? These two, combined together, might be considered the "call to the stockbroker."