Businesses with significant spikes in computational demands would benefit greatly from leveraging cloud applications during peak usage needs, so what is holding them back? The answer is security and compliance. Enterprises lack the identity management capabilities to control the highly elastic world of cloud computing. Businesses need a unified set of tools to manage resources across physical, virtual and cloud environments.
This is not yet occurring. Take the example of company trying to setup a user for access to a software as a service (SaaS) application. Typically, a company uses one tool to provision internal applications based on an employee’s role, yet if that same employee needs access to a SaaS applications like GoogleApps, those must be provisioned separately. This means the IT administrator has to perform two tasks for accomplishing one objective — creating unnecessary cost and opportunities for error.
Wouldn’t it be great if our provisioning processes could span the physical and virtual boundaries? We need a central way to provision both internal and external applications, driven by the enterprise’s roles and policies. Otherwise, we’re left with a siloed approach that’s far too risky. For example, as soon as a sales rep leaves a company, their enterprise applications like GroupWise are disabled. Yet the IT administrator also has to remember to remove their access to cloud apps like Salesforce.com. Otherwise the user could easily get access to highly sensitive company information.
That’s where intelligent workload management (IWM) comes in. By managing workloads intelligently, we could consume information about the computing environment and the enterprise policies, using this intelligent to make appropriate determinations about managing that workload. For example, by having identity and security embedded into a workload an enterprise can extend the same policies, roles and workflows that they have in the data center now to the cloud. Thus, businesses could prevent security and compliance breaches from occurring in the first place.
So you may wonder: This sounds great, but am I ready for IWM? IWM is not a solution. It is a strategy for where a company needs to be if it is to harness the benefits of different resources such as physical, virtual and cloud. As such, there a number of steps enterprises and cloud providers can take today to create the fabric for intelligent management of workloads tomorrow. For example, companies like Verizon are already investing in this vision, paving the way to manage identities in the cloud. This is an important foundation for keeping cloud applications secure and compliant for enterprises.
We’re also seeing many enterprises take early steps toward this model with the adoption of private clouds. In a recent InterOp survey, more than 24 percent respondents noted that they either have deployed or have plans to deploy private clouds within their organization in the next year. This allows IT teams to test provisioning of small virtualized environments. As they become more comfortable with attaching security to virtualization, we’ll see businesses embrace IWM.
How are you thinking about your intelligent workload management strategy? Are you seeing these models emerge in your business? We’ll be writing more on this topic soon, and would be keen to hear your thoughts on the matter.
Posted
Jun 30 2010, 09:10 PM
by
AnitaMoorthy