Identity management, compliance management and workload mobility

Intelligent Workload Management Intelligent Workload Management , Virtualization

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Intelligent Workload Management: Cloud Computing, Data Center, Intelligent Workload Management, Security, Virtualization
Companies : Google, IBM, Novell, SAP

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  1. Identity management, compliance management and workload mobility

    The web is chock full of both hype and fear surrounding the challenges of cloud adoption. When you’re talking about the public cloud, there’s a lot of truth in that fear. In some ways, focusing on access control and user security obscures impossibly tangled issues, like who is responsible for security and data protection in the cloud. Deploying a private cloud, and attacking these problems within the safety of your own network, can mean the difference between success and failure in the public cloud.

    These are tough problems to solve, and are well beyond the scope of a single vendor or single product. Conquering these challenges is all about attacking them incrementally, not all at once. And so we struggle to define the path and the steps, but the final result is clear: we need a way to manage the myriad workloads an enterprise needs in an intelligent way.

    This goes beyond merely improving traditional central management tools, and instead learning how to truly shift some of this hard work of managing roving, mobile workloads to the workloads themselves. When you only have a few things to keep track of, it doesn’t matter much how you do it. When you have thousands, constantly shifting around, it matters a great deal. Intelligent workload management is about infusing workloads with the capability to manage itself.

    No, it’s not as sinister as it sounds. I don’t think we need to worry about SkyNet just yet… what we’re talking about here is starting with the small stuff. The questions that only the workload really knows the answer to anyhow: how much resource is really available, and when might more be needed? Who is allowed access, and who can make changes? Questions of identity, ownership, policy could be answered by a central server, but only so long as the workload can always access that resource.

    By infusing the workload with functions like identity management, policy and compliance management, performance management, and event handling, we can create workloads that don’t need to call for permission or instructions every time something new occurs. This is the essence of intelligent workload management, and it’s what enables workload mobility.

    The problems above can become a lot more tolerable if you start building the policies, technologies, and skillsets to deal with workload mobility while the workloads are still inside your firewall. Building a private cloud, and then working to deploy intelligent workloads to it, is the critical stepping-stone to leveraging the public cloud. Only by understanding and addressing these fundamental workload management challenges internally can you begin to feel safe moving workloads outside your perimeter.

    Identity management, data encryption, policy enforcement, and compliance management are the key to your workloads surviving. Build a private cloud today and take on these challenges on your own terms.

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