Cloud automation software provider CloudVelox Inc. today is expanding its automation and orchestration capabilities with new features that support customer processes as well as technology.

The company’s One Hybrid Cloud software enables enterprises to map their existing network environments to a new or preconfigured network design on an Amazon Web Services cloud, cutting migrations by weeks or months. The software also enables migrated workloads to be continually optimized by monitoring instances, storage, availability and security to fine-tune resources and improve performance.

New features in version 4.0 optimization include application-centric instance tagging, placement groups, multiple security groups and identity and access management roles. IAM roles make up the most common “unexpected cloud costs, such as figuring out how to map existing security policies, access roles and data governance policies from an on-premise data center to the cloud,” said CloudVelox Chief Executive Raj Dhingra.

The company expects that customers will use the new migration services in advance of a move to make it easier to get processes on track after the migration is completed. Instance tagging enables instances to be categorized by type of application, line of business, owner and up to 50 other categories for billing, reporting, utilization analysis and policy management. Once the instances are running in the cloud, consolidated reports can be run across them.

IAM roles are a type of authentication that specifies what users can do with particular applications and virtual machines in the cloud. CloudVelox now enables customers to define policies by application as they are being moved, including security policies. Using IAM roles eliminates the need to distribute security credentials to instances, and it permits access permissions to be modified at both the group and individual system levels. CloudVelox currently works with Microsoft Active Directory and the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol.

Placement groups are an AWS infrastructure group that provides low latency and high throughput for exceptionally demanding applications. “You can now assign placement groups in AWS prior to migration and you’ll soon be able to monitor apps as they’re running in the cloud to selectively start and shut them down,” Dhingra said.

New reporting features can inventory selected applications for replication and identify necessary cloud characteristics such as central processing unit and memory requirements, instance type, storage type and other variables. A post-migration report shows infrastructure services used by each application. A sync report lists which systems have synced and their level of consistency. Several new alerts have also been added.

The service is priced at $350 per virtual machine or server. The company makes a free test available here.

Image: CloudVelox