A startup called Velostrata Inc. wants to make it easier and cheaper for enterprises to migrate on-premises workloads to Google LLC’s cloud platform.

The startup said its new GCP-Velostrata-integrated service can reduce the cost of workload migrations by performing them five times faster than conventional methods. In turn, that reduces the amount of time companies are forced to run parallel workloads both on-premises and in the cloud. That’s necessary for mission-critical apps because they can’t be switched off until full data replication has been achieved.

Velostrata reckons its migration service, which is being offered free, can be useful both for companies that want to go “all-in” on the cloud and those that have adopted a hybrid cloud/on-premises infrastructure. The company already offers similar solutions for migrating workloads to other popular public cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, claiming that it completes most jobs in under an hour.

The company said it can speed up cloud migrations thanks to a new “agentless” real-time streaming technology that shaves off an average of five hours of information-technology staff labor per server. The streaming technology works by separating virtual machines from the data they use before shipping them outside the firewall.

That allows it to move the core components of an application to the cloud in a much shorter time than other methods. The software also automatically adapts the workload’s configuration settings for the Google Cloud Platform, which means that it becomes usable almost as soon as the initial transfer completes. As a result, companies can shift their workloads to Google’s cloud and have them up and running in “minutes,” Velostrata said in its pitch.

The service also offers an “instant rollback” feature in case any problems crop up, so users can rest assured that they’ll be able to keep their workloads running in the event of any issues that might crop up.

Issy Ben-Shaul, the chief executive officer of Velostrata, said companies that attempt to migrate workloads without controlling virtualization host density and overprovisioning often find their costs skyrocket.

“We cater to the intersection of these needs by offering customers a new ‘right sizing’ feature that monitors their actual utilization per workload on-premises and migrates these instances to appropriately sized and often lower-cost instances in the cloud,” Ben-Shaul said. “Together with Google Cloud’s unique Custom Machine Types capability, customers are able to provision just the right amount of resources, thereby avoiding wasted spend.”

Moreover, customers can use the service’s test-drive feature to prevalidate their application’s performance on Google’s cloud, Ben-Shaul said.

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