The hybrid cloud model became a lot more appealing last week after Google Inc. officially launched its container service into general availability following nearly a year in beta testing. Organizations can now seamlessly move containerized workloads from their on-premise infrastructure to its cloud platform and vice versa as their requirements change.

But the ability to physically move an application from one environment to another is only one of the prerequisites for cloud interoperability. Administrators also need a way to migrate the associated data and management policies to the new location, an issue that has given rise to numerous new startups in the last few quarters promising to simplify the process.

Containers share that challenge with virtual machines, which are the focus of the latest interoperability startup to have hit the scene. Velostrata Ltd. exited stealth on the same day that Google launched its new service with $14 million in funding and a patent-pending technology that allows virtual machines moved off-premise to access data stored behind the firewall.

That enables administrators to easily tap the cloud for additional capacity in situations when their internal infrastructure can’t effectively meet demand, like during the massive traffic spikes that online retailers tend to see during the holiday shopping season. Achieving such elasticity has traditionally required making significant architectural modifications to the application being stretched off-premise.

As a result, many processes that don’t require access to in-house data or some other special configuration are simply being moved to the cloud in their entirely, a transition that Salesforce.com Inc. hopes to accelerate with the redesign of its customer management platform that was rolled out last week. The update promises to help users become a lot more productive in how they handle leads.

One of the main highlights of the new interface is a collection of customizations each geared towards a different vertical segment. The first item in the lineup targets salespeople at banks with functionality for engaging customers looking to purchase financial services, which complements a personalized notification system introduced in conjunction that automatically displays information deemed relevant to a user’s work.

Photo via giografiche