In an attempt to allow customers the effortless shifting of workloads between their own infrastructure and the Verizon cloud, Verizon Business is introducing a new service which will be based on two new VMware products – vCloud Director and vShield – which were unveiled at the VMworld conference at San Francisco on Tuesday.

While the VMware vCloud Director is a new cloud management tool that has chiefly been designed to help administrators move workloads between private and public clouds; the vShield comprises software that helps maintain security and compliance policies – like rule-based access controls – when the workloads are moved.

Equipped with the two new VMware tools, both of which are now available, the new Verizon service, called “CaaS enabled by VMware vCloud Datacenter”, will become due for general availability in early 2011.

According to Verizon and VMware, the service will allow the VMware-using businesses to move workloads out to Verizon’s CaaS (Computing as a Service) infrastructure and back again. As such, it will enable organizations to ease their way into cloud computing or benefit from improved computing resources whenever required.

Verizon is already offering a CaaS service - introduced last June – which requires businesses to commit to the sending of certain workloads to the Verizon cloud. That service will also remain available even after the new service is started.

Verizon has revealed that the first company to participate in the trial of the new service is InterContinental Hotels Group that boasts over 4,500 hotel properties in more than 100 countries and territories.