I've seen many presentations and talks from companies that are using cloud services to replace traditional IT infrastructures and lower their costs. Often these presentations are from smaller companies that don't want to hire an IT administrator, or buy server or learn how to host and manage that hardware. Plenty of small companies would prefer that each employee manage their own laptop and nothing more.

However many of those strategies don't match the situation for large companies. Once you've hired an IT staff and made an investment in hardware and facilities, can the cloud really help you? I had my doubts, but this article about Toyota makes me rethink those doubts, or at least many of them.

Read the rest of "The Cloud in Large IT Shops" at SQLServerCentral.