Building a data center is a massive investment. It requires investment in real estate, reinforced facilities, raised floors, state-of-the art power and cooling, and IT infrastructure such as networks, servers, and storage -- not to mention the experienced data center staff to manage it all. Firms build new data centers for a variety of reasons: capacity limitations, modernization, consolidation, and many others. But firms also need an alternate data center that's an appropriate distance away so they can failover critical business operations in the event of a primary site failure. Given the necessary investment, an alternate data center simply can't remain idle waiting for some disaster to occur. Firms must determine ways to maximize this investment to improve business operations, accelerate growth, or elevate availability.