Cast Iron, Amazon partner to push migration to EC2 cloud

You've no doubt heard all the buzz about virtual data centers and doing business in the cloud, as well as all the money that can be saved.

But when it comes time to do make the move, there are a lot of things to think about. Will all of the data move to the cloud or will some of it stay local? What about flipping the switch? How long does that take? Will the business have to go dark at any time? What happens to the business operations? moving your business - or parts of it - to the cloud and that money that can be saved.

Amazon and Cast Iron Systems, a provider of cloud integration services, will announce a partnership this week to marry Cast Iron's Services and Amazon Web Services and offer enterprises a way to move their applications to the Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud (Amazon EC2).

In a nutshell, Cast Iron is trying to be the middleman between what's happening on-site and what's happening in the cloud. In one role, the company is helping its business customers migrate data to the cloud. But in its other role, it's helping manage access to that data across the network, ensuring that access to data in the cloud is just as seamless as the access to the data on-site.

It's taking the approach that the move to the cloud isn't necessarily an all-or-nothing approach, recognizing that companies are being cautious about the cloud.

Cast Iron and Amazon will host a joint webinar on Cast Iron migration and integration for Amazon EC2 on Sept. 24. Registration information is here.

Other coverage: NetSuite aims to connect to Salesforce.com's cloud

Phil Wainewright's SaaS blog