Moving on-premise applications to the cloud used to take weeks or even months of painstaking manual work, but the task can now be completed in under an hour if Velostrata Inc. is to be believed. The startup raised $17.5 million in funding this week from a group of investors led by Intel Corp.’s venture capital arm to spread the word about its time-conscious approach to performing workload migrations.

At the core of Velostrata’s pitch is a patent-pending transfer method that involves separating virtual machines from the data they use before shipping them outside the firewall. According to the startup’s website, the technology enables its namesake migration tool to move the core components and of an application the cloud in as little as a few minutes. The software also automatically adapts the workload’s configuration settings to the target platform in the process, which means that it becomes usable almost as soon as the initial transfer completes. The data associated with the service is then gradually streamed to the newly created off-premise deployment in the background without holding up business activity.

In the meantime, applications can pull records on-demand from a company’s on-premise environment via a hybrid cloud mechanism that doesn’t require making any major code modifications. The downside is that constantly having to fetch information over the network slows down response times, but Velostrata reduces the delay by storing every workload’s most frequently used records in a cloud cache. As a result, the startup says that its software is robust enough to handle mission-critical systems such as ERP deployments, OLTP applications and important middleware. A new release of the offering that rolled out in conjunction with the funding announcement also adds support for testing use cases.

In practice, that means Velostrata can now be used to create a remote copy of an in-house workload without any preparation and immediately start carrying out automated performance checks. The startup says that its offering is capable of cloning an application if it’s running live in production or requires a specalized network configuration to operate. This week’s investment will help expand the usefulness of the software even further and scale marketing efforts in conjunction.

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