The most likely role that cloud computing will play in the big data space is cold storage, an area that is still underutilized by the business community. Cold storage is extremely cheap, slow, data that resides on disk, stored up and put on an archive for safe keeping.

There's very little chance that this data will ever need to be used in day-to-day IT, so if you move it to an offsite data repository it's easy to do so without having to let it take up space in your data center or operational systems. If that data repository is in the cloud, you'll be able to access it remotely from your data center, and there's no need to go all the way offsite to pick up disks or tapes.