Ask most data center staff how their professional performance is measured and it will be on availability, nothing else. Financial or operational efficiency doesn’t matter. Their main responsibility is ensuring workers and customers can access the data and business applications they rely on every day.

If the engineering manager requests a batch of new servers or hardware critical to maintaining availability, then the CFO has little choice but to comply. After all, the data center can never fail. It powers everything our world runs on — national economies and banking, transportation, social media.