What is intelligent cloud and what factors are driving its growth?

There are numerous definitions of intelligent cloud; a fundamental approach is to view an intelligent cloud as the complete computing fabric, from enterprise data centers to cloud facilities to everything-as-a-service, which allows these assets to both intelligently interoperate and to work independently, as needed and appropriate.

There are several factors driving the intelligent cloud:

• Multiple data centers which seamlessly work together as a larger facility
• Co-location facilities, which should be viewed, at their simplest, as a physical extension of enterprise facilities
• Cloud computing, which provides a virtual platform for workloads
• Growth of edge facilities, which must be incorporated into the larger fabric
• Growth of mobile devices, which have their own (significant) computing power, but also unique requirements regarding connectivity and application/data availability

The role of the intelligent cloud is to incorporate the end-to-end computing elements, from data centers to devices, and the trends above, into an intelligent computing fabric optimizing infrastructure, availability, latency and security. Workload placement is an integral function of the intelligent cloud, which becomes evermore complex yet useful, and required, as the computing fabric becomes ever richer.