Hendrick Automotive Group, in Charlotte, N.C., is a multi-billion dollar company, but it employs an IT team of 13. Those 13 individuals support 7,000 employees at 75 dealerships, making the operation a prime candidate for Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) Office 365 cloud service, reports Shane O'Neill at CIO magazine.

Maintaining on-premise applications for email, productivity tools and collaboration had started making it hard to support company growth. Given the lean IT staff, scaling the company's IT capacity was a very time-consuming prospect, but by moving to a cloud service, updates and additions could be accomplished overnight.

"If the Mr. Hendrick walked in tomorrow and said I just bought 20 car dealers, how would we accommodate that?" said Robert Taylor, director of IT. "The lead time for something like that is months, but with a cloud service, if you need to scale you push a button."

The mid-sized automotive business is well-suited to cloud services because it does not require a lot of customization when it comes to Exchange or SharePoint. "We operate pretty much out of the box," Taylor said. "There's not much additional value we add to Office 2010 by managing it ourselves."

The migration to SharePoint in the cloud is taking a bit longer than the migration to Exchange in the cloud, however. Each of the company's 75 dealerships operates its own SharePoint intranet and uses the system as it wishes. Eventually, all of the SharePoint sites will move to the cloud, Taylor said, but users will make it a slower pace of change.

And as for the inevitability of cloud failures, Taylor is not fazed. "Outages are going to happen. It's all about how you deal with them. They will happen on-prem to us or will happen in a Microsoft facility," he said. "But we can't afford to have a giant data center with people monitoring servers 24 hours a day. So why not let somebody with more resources do it?"

For more:
- see Shane O'Neill's article at CIO

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