As a DBA the first thing that pops into my mind is large scale BI processing and data mining. This will put quite some pressure on the challenge of moving around large amounts of data both fast and secure. It also requires the provider to sell this kind of processing power for an hour a day or so. But in many cases the in-house processing for BI purposes requires additional powerful servers that will be nearly idle most of the day.

If a giant like Google is able to provide data processing to clients on a global scale, it would make better use of the required resources because at any time somewhere someone will need to process some data. After a huge initial amount of data, only the deltas are needed so the amount of data transferred could be quite manageable. Maybe in the future we will receive our daily cubes from Google ...