If you’re in charge of an IT operation these days, you’re sure to be feeling pressure to take advantage of the cloud— pressure that might be coming from yourself, your boss, your CIO or even your customers. If you’re not feeling the pressure, you will soon. Charting a path to shift resources and services to on-premises and off-site clouds takes some real thought and, ideally, some familiar tools to help you get there safely and in one piece.

A recent study found that 70% of organizations have at least one application living in the cloud, perhaps email or web hosting or even a financial system. But that’s relatively low-hanging fruit compared with, say, moving your development environment off site or hosting your proprietary apps on someone else’s hardware. For that, you need to maintain a sense of control and visibility, and be able to do it from afar. After all, you can’t just walk into a cloud-vendor’s data center, roll in a crash cart and check on your servers.