<p>As one of the top buzzwords in 2012, "the cloud" quickly changed from a mythical place in the sky where your data and information went to live, to the likely solution for businesses and organisations looking for the next best way to manage their SharePoint deployments and company data in 2013 and onward.</p><p>Gartner Research predicts that 50% of Global 1000 companies will store customer-sensitive data in the public cloud by 2016, so it's a sure bet that IT teams everywhere are already planning for a move from their on-premise SharePoint environments to some sort of cloud model. The only question that still remains is whether to run a hybrid environment, utilising both on-premise and cloud resources, or to go all-in and move fully to the cloud, removing all of your company's data from within its own walls.</p><p>The benefits of incorporating the cloud into your SharePoint deployment are well known - decreased management responsibilities for your IT team, increased flexibility in terms of scalability, infrastructure disaster recovery, and more cost effective licensing models are some of the many positives to be incurred through such a move. But which combination of on-premise and cloud environments will allow your organisation to see the most value?</p><p>The options for bringing your SharePoint to the cloud are many, including Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Managed Services. How you decide to optimise SharePoint will depend on your current needs, and whether it is on-premise, online, or a hybrid combination of the two, there are plenty of options to consider.</p><p><a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/management-briefing/2013/03/sharepoint-2013-head-in-the-clouds/">Keep reading...</a></p>