Velostrata, a startup letting enterprises take a piecemeal approach to cloud migration, has raised a $17.5 million Series B and enhanced its cloud-migration software.

The funding was led by Intel Capital, joined by prior investors Norwest Venture Partners and 83 North.

Velostrata's software lets enterprises keep storage wherever they want — any combination of on-premises and in the cloud — while migrating compute workloads to the cloud.

The trick is to let those cloud-based workloads continue to use the data that might be stored on-premises or in a different cloud. Normally, the newly migrated workload would store its own copy of that data — and, in fact, the usual routine would be to replicate the data and send it up to the cloud. By removing that step, Velostrata claims it allows for cloud workloads to be created just about spontaneously.

That speed means an enterprise can try out various public clouds on the fly. Velostrata pitches the concept as a means of gradual cloud migration — that is, you could move some workloads to the cloud first, and move storage later. Other possible benefits would be protection against getting locked into one cloud and the ability to cloudburst, moving workloads into the cloud when on-premises equipment gets overloaded.

Version 2.0, being announced today, also adds support for Microsoft Azure. Velostrata already supported Amazon Web Services (AWS). More importantly, it adds a feature the company calls smart migration, which ensures that an application continues to stay up and running while its underlying computing power gets moved to the cloud.

The startup was founded in 2014 and announced a $14 million Series A in August.

Version 1.0 of the company's product was launched in beta near the end of 2015, with general availability announced in March.