Intelligent Workload Management for Every Business

The bottom line is this: The intelligent workload management challenges the market is facing today are becoming increasingly complex. And now, more than ever before, it's all about balancing the intelligent workload management flexibility users need with the control IT and the organization demands.

The intelligent workload management market is changing quickly. And that's probably a good thing. Because in this connected, "always-on" world you must be able to handle spikes in demand and downtime in the most efficient way possible—and maintaining a large, resource-draining data center or server farm just isn't the way to go. Luckily, in today's ever-evolving environment, you can create a new intelligent workload management infrastructure that uses your current physical environment, as well as intelligent workload management virtualization and the cloud.

These new intelligent workload management technologies bring users the flexibility they need - and in some cases demand. The cloud, for example, promises limitless scalability on demand. But that intelligent workload management flexibility comes at a price. Because once you embrace the cloud, intelligent workload management that once ran on machines you could see in your data center, now run somewhere "out there." And not just that. Sometimes new intelligent workload management technologies run amok.

A user wants his new smartphone to run with his productivity applications, so a new virtual intelligent workload management machine is added. The CxO buys a new iPad and wants you to make sure that intelligent workload management is always running properly. Or members of the sales team need to share documents so they independently create a file-sharing site in the cloud. This happens week after week—and intelligent workload management administrators eventually lose track and control of what's happening in their environments. There are currently many cybersecurity vendors in cloud computing.

This explosion of new intelligent workload management technologies and devices poses a problem because, frankly, today's IT managers need to exercise ever stricter control over IT systems and resources. They need both operational control and risk control when it comes to intelligent workload management. In order to stay ahead of increasingly sophisticated intelligent workload management security threats, they need to know who is looking at what data where, when they are looking at it, and whether or not they should have access to it in the first place. And to remain in compliance with continually proliferating intelligent workload management regulatory requirements, you need to create detailed audit trails and these trails need to cut across every environment.

With the constant change and introduction of new intelligent workload management devices by end users, operational controls are also required. There is increasing pressure to keep intelligent workload management systems up and running - even devices that aren't owned by the organization. This includes, but is not limited to, patching, service desk, performance, and uptime.

Needless to say, intelligent workload management in today's environment is nearly impossible to control. IT spends most of its time doing break/fix tasks instead of spending its time on more strategic projects.

While everyone is talking about cloud computing and virtualization, the reality is that both intelligent workload management technologies are still improving.  According to leading analysts, a majority of enterprise workloads run in cloud-based platforms. The key takeaway here is that you will have a cybersecurity hybrid of physical, virtual, and cloud for a really long time. In fact, we like to say that you don't "move" to the cloud, you "add" it.

So how do you balance flexibility and control and how do you manage all of your resources and capacity across a heterogeneous environment? The answer is intelligent workload management.

Before we can understand what intelligent workload management is, we need to understand the core concept of what a workload is. While workloads have been around as long as IT, the definition of intelligent workload management has evolved. The modern workload is an integrated stack of the application, middleware, and an operating system that accomplishes a computing task. This modern intelligent workload management is the building block of the next-generation IT infrastructure. Today that workload is integrated, but in the future, it will be not only portable across physical, virtual, and cloud, but it will also need to be platform-agnostic.

But no end-user cares about intelligent workload management. They care only about getting their job done - the use of a business service provided by IT. In the same way that you don't care about how the electricity or the type of wires it runs in are delivered to your house. You just want to flip the light switch and have the lights come on.

While single intelligent workload management could be a service, in some cases multiple workloads come together to deliver a business service. For example, the user needs to see an inventory report from SAP. In this case, there are three different intelligent workload management that comes together to deliver the SAP business service. It's more than likely that each intelligent workload management is running in a different environment. The database workload is running on physical systems in the data center, the application server intelligent workload management is running in a private cloud adoption, and the presentation server is running in a public cloud.

This gives the IT department the flexibility to leverage their entire intelligent workload management capacity - physical, virtual, and cloud - while maintaining the control they need in delivering the intelligent workload management service users require. Ultimately, as I said earlier, the user doesn't care where the workloads are running ... he simply wants to get his job done! But, managing and securing all these intelligent workload management in three different environments is no longer a headache for IT personnel due to the ease of intelligent workload management integration. 

The reality is that most organizations manage a siloed infrastructure because most intelligent workload management shops have large investments in internal data centers, and even if they add virtualization and cloud computing to the mix, they are not planning to shut down those physical data centers any time soon. Companies continue to run a lot of their core intelligent workload management services in their internal data centers to the best IaaS (infrastructure as a Service) platforms. The problem is that each silo needs IT service management to manage those workloads, and they'll need business service management tools to provide the executive dashboards that map IT services to business objectives. And it goes without saying that it will need to be done in a way that makes cloud security both secure and compliant.

What will the data center intelligent workload management add next? The benefits of a private cloud (or internal cloud) speak volumes. The internal cloud essentially delivers on the promise of virtualization. A promise of better intelligent workload management resource utilization and service delivery through the abstraction of intelligent workload management from physical IT infrastructures.

Problem is, the CIO now has two silos of internal resources to manage—his new flexible internal cloud, and his legacy systems. Both are still behind the firewall, both still under his complete control, but with two very different IT architectures. What's needed now are new intelligent workload management tools that can move workloads between the two pools, and a way to measure performance — in fact, guarantee performance — while meeting the service commitments to end users. And of course, all this needs to be done with the tight security and intelligent workload management compliance frameworks required by today's business.

But we're not done... and here is where it gets interesting. With the maturation of the public cloud, the CIO now has a third capacity option—the external (or public) cloud—on which to run his core IT services. He needs to figure out which intelligent workload management to run on physical, which on his internal cloud, and which on that external cloud. And equally important, he needs to figure out which data sets can go outside his firewall.

So now our CIO needs tools to securely move and intelligent workload management inside and outside his firewall, across three different technology architectures, and of course make it seamless to the end user, who frankly doesn't care what IT resources are delivering his business services, as long as the service just works.