4 PART 3 Workload assessment Armed with important background information and firm-level buy-in, IT leaders can continue by conducting a workload assessment. This will help the organization determine what should move to the cloud and what should remain on-premises. First, it’s important to understand that a workload is an application and the resources required to support the application, such as compute, network, and storage. An example of a workload might be a three-tier application stack that includes: ͓ ͓A web instance ͓ ͓A single database ͓ ͓A business application These three components work together to perform a task. While the web instance and database might be on large servers hosting multiple web instances and databases,only the separate components are part of the workload. Some helpful logic to identify what constitutes a workload would be: Can the components be separated or moved and still perform their basic task or functionality? If so, then most likely they are part of separate workloads. As an example, a single database can be moved to a separate database server, and thus the database server is not a workload but rather a platform that hosts workloads. What is a workload? Datalink SVP and GM, Shawn O’Grady, offers an evolved definition of this key concept.