I'm in a Directors role now but was formerly a DBA for many years and still try to keep my hands in the dirt. I have to say that we are considering the cloud to help with test and dev environments. The concerns and issues around security have kept us from moving forward, especially since I work in the healthcare space, but we're now looking at tackling that concern with data masking. Masking all PHI in our test and dev environments somewhat alleviates the security and privacy concern.

We think that putting our db's in the cloud and placing most of the maintenance and administration on the service provider will allow my DBA's to spend more time focused on the more critical production transaction systems.

I don't think the cloud is going away, which also makes me think that eventually we technical folks will all be working for these service providers and very few will actually be working directly for the company’s that use the service.