Data storage company Cohesity Inc. has created a new application that gives enterprises a better template for moving workloads between on-premises information technology environments and the public cloud.

The new app announced today, Cohesity Runbook, helps companies automate the process of moving data and workloads via a drag-and-drop graphical interface that simplifies what has always been a hugely complex task.

Previously, moving workloads between different IT environments involved lots of heavy lifting, such as manual processing, writing new scripts and dealing with incompatible virtual machine formats. And doing so was risky, since any mistakes would inevitably mean the workload fails to launch properly.

Cohesity Runbook is meant to complement Cohesity’s main offering, which is its DataProtect platform that’s used for managing and backing up data stored in the cloud or on on-premises platforms.

Cohesity said the app, which currently only supports moving workloads from on-premises to Amazon Web Services Inc.’s public cloud and vice-versa, would be especially useful for companies that want to use the cloud for backup and disaster recovery purposes. Other possible uses include moving data or workloads to the cloud for DevOps and application testing, the company said.

“The Cohesity Runbook application gives IT administrators the ability to create their own precise, step-by-step blueprint that makes it easy for their organizations to take advantage of the cloud for application migration and failover,” said Vineet Abraham, Cohesity’s senior vice president of products.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE that Cohesity Runbook should be a useful tool for companies looking to migrate existing workloads to the cloud.

“Enterprises are increasingly moving their on-premises workloads to the cloud, and for this process they need all the help they can get,” Mueller said. “The good news is that instead of a manual and potentially error-prone process, programmatic and automated tools are coming into the marketplace.”

Cohesity said its Runbook app is now available to download from the Cohesity Marketplace. It also said it’s planning to add support for other public clouds later this year.

The launch of the new app is just the latest milestone in what has been a busy year for Cohesity. In May for example, the company announced its first acquisition, buying a startup called Imanis Data Inc. that offers cloud backup services for NoSQL databases. Earlier in the year the company announced a key partnership with Google LLC that allowed it to offer backup and recovery services for applications running on Google Cloud.

Sai Mukundan, Cohesity’s director of product management, appeared on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, to discuss the Google partnership in more detail:

Photo: Cohesity/Facebook