Operational data in a distributed processing system is managed by monitoring a workload of the system to establish a current assessment of operational data movement between data sources and data targets, receiving historical information on previous data movement including previous instances of movement resulting in a compromise of one or more quality-of-service criteria, determining from the current assessment and historical information that upcoming operational data actions will not meet a particular quality-of-service criterion, and responsively applying a data management optimization infrastructure (data backplane services) adapted to advance the particular quality-of-service criterion according to definitions for the data sources and data targets. The operational outcome is predicted using a cognitive system trained with historical information including historical operational factors correlated with historical operational outcomes relative to the quality-of-service criteria.