With all of the financial and productivity benefits that cloud hosting promises, organizations are increasingly looking to offload on-premises installations to the cloud. SharePoint is no exception. With the latest cloud-based versions of the collaboration platform, IT decision makers are faced with a choice: deploy it in-house or go to the cloud. HiSoftware Inc., a leading provider of compliance and security solutions for SharePoint, announced today that the company’s HiSoftware Sheriff suite of solutions now support both private cloud and on-premises instances of SharePoint.
 
While some experts predict that cloud-based SharePoint implementations will overtake on-premises instances in short order, a Forrester Research Inc. survey of IT decision makers showed that 62 percent still plan to deploy SharePoint 2013 on-premises. The fact remains that while many will look to the cloud the majority of implementations still runon-premises, and many will likely be a combination of the two for compliance and security reasons.
 
“The future of collaboration is hybrid, and public and private cloud have a role to play, as will on-premises systems. We also believe that collaboration will grow in importance over the coming years, and will present more challenges and opportunities than at any time in the past,” said Alan Pelz-Sharpe, research director for Content Management & Collaboration at 451 Research. “Bringing security and control to enterprise collaboration will be part of this challenge. The key will be in finding products and an approach that meet both regulatory and common sense requirements.”
 
Both HiSoftware Compliance Sheriff® SP and HiSoftware Security Sheriff™ SP now fully support SharePoint private cloud installations, in addition to traditional on-premises instances, and combination environments. HiSoftware solutions help organizations automate and enforce governance policies, as well as track and secure sensitive and regulated content at the item level to mitigate risk without hindering collaboration.
 
“While many of our clients are still using on-premises installations, it’s inevitable that organizations will eventually migrate to the cloud. Regardless of the environment the challenge remains the same: how to balance the benefits of open collaboration with risk management and security,” said Kurt Mueffelmann, president and CEO, HiSoftware. “HiSoftware solutions mitigate risk, while preserving collaboration, by securing sensitive content to meet governance requirements and protect against breaches, whether the information is on-premises or in the cloud.”