I find it interesting that nobody's seems to recognize the primary problem with relying on cloud services - putting the entire business in the hands of your ISP. You can get redundant pipes, but then you're looking at the beginning of way more overhead than the cloud DB sales team wants you to know about.

At my office if the WAN pipe goes down, I know production will still be happening and almost all internal processes will be unaffected. These cloud services will probably soon replace IT for small businesses that in reality don't actually rely on software, but for major businesses where severe downtime = doom the only option is locally hosted services.

Frankly I think this along with the rest the "end of IT" bandwagon are spreading uninformed FUD... The industry will of course adapt to new technology, but IT is unique in its inability to ever be completely displaced by technology.