[1] IWM enables the management and optimization of computing resources in a secure and compliant manner across physical, virtual and cloud environments to deliver business services for end customers.
Such a self-contained unit constitutes a "workload" in the narrow sense: an integrated stack consisting of application, middleware, database, and operating system devoted to a specific computing task.
"[4] A workload is considered "intelligent" when it a) understands its security protocols and processing requirements so it can self-determine whether it can deploy in the public cloud, the private cloud or only on physical machines; b) recognizes when it is at capacity and can find alternative computing capacity as required to optimize performance; c) carries identity and access controls as well as log management and compliance reporting capabilities with it as it moves across environments; and d) is fully integrated with the business service management layer, ensuring that end user computing requirements are not disrupted by distributed computing resources, and working with current and emergent IT management frameworks.
The deployment of individual workloads and workload-based business services in the "hybrid distributed data center,"[5] - including physical machines, data centers, private clouds, and the public cloud - raises a host of issues for the efficient management of provisioning, security, and compliance.
Ferguson, Y. Yemini, and C. Nikolaou "Microeconomic Algorithms for Load Balancing in Distributed Computing Systems" developed a theory by which workloads could be made "intelligent" to manage themselves.