Jeff Moden (8/3/2011)
I've found that one of the biggest reasons why people originate or move databases to the cloud is so that you don't have to have a lot of hardware locally. Once that's done, it's not like people are going to have a free server with enough storage space just idling around wait for you to move something back from the cloud.Because of that, one of two things will likely happen... either the requirement to move something back from the cloud will suddenly become a whole lot less important or there will be a huge panic tring to get equipment in place along with the funding to get it there.
My recommendation is to be very, very careful about what you migrate to the cloud to begin with because, once it's there, it's going to be a real bugger to bring back locally. To coin a phrase... "What goes up... may just stay there." 😛
One of the issues people have found is that development costs can skyrocket in the cloud. Developers send data back and forth, test things, eat up transactions with things like cross joins, etc. So those local servers still have a place.