Intelligent workload management

The concept of intelligent workload management (IWM) is an emerging methodological paradigm for IT systems management arising from the intersection of dynamic infrastructure, virtualization, identity management, and the discipline of software appliance development.

The IWM paradigm applies the concept of workload management first to the entire available pool of IT resources - individual machines, data center, internal and external cloud, etc. - whereby processing resources are dynamically assigned based on criteria such as business process priorities (for example, in balancing business intelligence queries against online transaction processing), resource availability, security protocols, or event scheduling, but extends this process into the structure of individual system components, such as virtual appliances.

When workloads are shifted to quasi-public resources such as the cloud, maintaining data security becomes a major concern. At the same time, monitoring and manually managing security in real-time becomes increasing complex across environments relying on dynamic resource allocation. Making workloads "intelligent" so that they can, to a degree, manage themselves in terms of where they run and who can access them, while simultaneously creating an ongoing record of their usage, helps reduce the complexity of security management and simultaneously enables more efficient use of internal and external IT resources.