Managing IT Workloads: Time for A More Intelligent Approach?

New technologies such as virtualization and cloud computing are changing the direction of IT faster than a New York cabbie switches lanes. Of course, that also means a shifting landscape for channel partners. Your customers no longer need to build and manage data centers for every infrastructure computing need. They can now tap into utility-like resources that allow them to scale up and down on the fly to meet actual needs and “pay as they go.” Such models let them instantly deploy new services. But those new opportunities also introduce new challenges.

While the lower cost and increased flexibility of these new technologies are compelling, security and compliance requirements must be addressed before broad adoption can become a reality. Intelligent workload management (IWM) is a new, effective model of computing that enables your customers to manage and optimize computing resources in a policy-driven, secure and compliant manner across physical, virtual and cloud environments.

Intelligent Workload Management Explained

An intelligent workload has embedded identity and access controls that move with the workload across environments. Intelligent workloads also have built-in real-time monitoring and reporting capabilities, can self-determine when and where to deploy, and can be managed by existing management frameworks. By integrating system management capabilities, you can increase security and portability of a workload across physical, virtual and cloud environments.

For example, an application workload doing health insurance claims processing for a US-based company would have the intelligence to know it’s using sensitive data regulated by HIPAA. Accordingly, an IT policy might direct the workload to run on a private cloud behind the firewall, and not allow it to deploy on a public cloud.

Today, you should help your customers solve their immediate business challenges, with the knowledge that you are putting them on the path to intelligent workload management. You can also uncover new sales and services opportunities regardless of whether you specialize in delivering architectures and infrastructures or provide system support.

What steps are you taking today to make your customers IT environments more intelligent?

Dan Dufault is global director of partner marketing at Novell. Guest blogs such as this one are part of The VAR Guy’s annual sponsorship program.