Spreading a firm’s workloads across multiple public clouds with the help of the best services from each can provide major operational benefits. But in practice, there are numerous technical barriers that stand in the way of organizations adopting such a model.

Veritas Technologies LLC hopes to lower the barrier with three new tools announced today. Each is designed to tackle a different part of the challenge. The first, CloudMobility, addresses the very first step in the process of implementing a multi-cloud approach: moving workloads from a company’s on-premise environment to an external platform.

The main highlight of the tool is a centralized console for managing migrations. It lets administrators conduct test runs to check that their transfer workflow functions as intended, carry out the operation with a single click once it’s go time and move applications to another cloud just as quickly if the need arises. The latter feature is designed to prevent firms from getting locked into a single platform, which is an all-too-common problem with complex enterprise workloads.

Removing the obstacles to migrating between clouds should make it more feasible for organizations to implement a provider-agnostic approach. But the ability to switch platforms is only one of several requirements that must be fulfilled for the model to be viable. Another top priority is protecting the information a company keeps in its different deployments, which Veritas plans to address with the second new offering that debuted today.

Dubbed CloudPoint, the tool allows companies to set up backup workflows for their disparate environments through a unified interface. It provides the ability to create a tailored snapshot schedule for each application and have copies automatically deleted after a certain period of time to conserve storage space.

Rounding out today’s rollout is an update to Veritas’ Information Map platform for tracking data assets. The release brings a new S3 connector that provides visibility into records kept in Amazon Inc.’s S3 storage service, with support for other platforms set to follow suit further down the road. Veritas’ goal is to turn Information Map into a far-reaching monitoring hub through which companies can keep an eye on the data in all the different platforms they use.

Such insight is essential to upholding security and compliance rules, especially in a large organization where information can easily get lost. This holds particular relevant in view of the recent revelation that Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., a leading defense contractor, kept information about a sensitive military project inside an unsecured Amazon S3 bucket. The data trove reportedly contained more than 60,000 files that could be accessed without so much as a password.

Image: Veritas