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

Taylor and team realized the best decision was to reallocate resources toward a cloud model for email and productivity apps and recently approached Microsoft about moving to Office 365. In addition to simply having an overburdened IT staff, Hendrick is also a good fit for the cloud because they don't do much customization within Exchange and SharePoint.

"We operate pretty much out of the box," says Taylor. "There's not much additional value we add to Office 2010 by managing it ourselves. It makes us a good candidate for the cloud."

Hendrick's goal is to migrate to all features of Office 365 (Exchange, Lync and SharePoint) eventually. But the more immediate goal is the messaging components, says Taylor.