Biggest Under Reported Story: Google's BigTable Costs 10 Times Less than Amazon's SimpleDB High Scalability: "On SimpleDB a 1TB database costs $1,500/month and BigTable costs in the $180/month range. As you grow into ever larger data sets the difference becomes even more compelling."
This is important... game changing.. etc etc. For professional DBAs - figure out how to educate your management on these options, and take the initiative to suggest times when it might be practical to do so.
Believe it or not, but "security" alone is not a good enough reason to keep your data store in house. Security measures are a challenge to truly "get," but have been proven nonetheless. All of your customers already use companies that use these services to store their data and accept it. And those companies are not suffering the sort of hysterical breaches some people resistant to change rant about. If you are hanging on this, it's only a matter of time before some high-priced, respected consultants come through the door and lay the case out to management how they can save millions, and it is safe. Right after that, Gartner and Forrester will endorse the whole game. Making sure you are ahead of the curve when the day comes will put you in a great position.
The way I see it, the number one reason for massive in house storage expenses is speed of access... and it is a big one.
Regardless, try to brainstorm, and pull in some developers if necessary, ways using these options might be possible within your Enterprise.
