According to Techaisle SMBs do not merely expect to save money when they turn to the cloud-- they also demand nothing less than a strategic platform boosting their agility and competitiveness.

The survey covers equal numbers on business decision makers (BDMs) and IT decision makers (ITDMs) for what the analyst describes as a “360° perspective”.

Reportedly the "middle" SMB market (companies with 50-250 employees) want more productive IT staff, while smaller and larger organisations want to enable business staff. Either way, SMBs use a mix of public, private and hybrid clouds, often with 2-3 simultaneous approaches.

Hybrid appears to be the dominant delivery model, and demand is high for cloud storage, data backup and cloud security at a workload level, and for vertical applications, content publishing, CRM and analytics in SaaS.

Oracle adds two services to its enterprise cloud services portfolio--  Database Backup and Storage Cloud, both part of the company's effort to push further into the cloud.

"The new services are based on open standards, integrated to work together seamlessly, and designed to support full portability between on-premises and cloud environments," the company says.

Database Backup makes part of the Oracle Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and provides a scalable Oracle Database cloud backup solution. It is integrated with the Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN), so customers can use familiar RMAN commands for seamless backup and recovery operations between on-premise and cloud storage.

VMware adds disaster recovery (DR) capability to the vCloud Hybrid Service with Disaster Recovery, a cloud-based service the company claims is simple to set up and costs a "fraction" of the cost and complexity of alternative solutions.

VMware vCloud Hybrid Service - Disaster Recovery (to give the full name) continuous replicates virtual machines to a virtual data centre, with a recovery point objective (RPO) ranging from 15 minutes to 24 hours.

It features self-service asynchronous replication, failover and fallback, with remote management, monitoring and production-level support.

According to a Skyhigh Networks report only 9% of cloud services European organisations use provide enterprise-grade security capability, meaning the remaining 91% pose "medium to high" security risks.

The study covers 1 million users across 40 European companies from the financial, healthcare, high technology, manufacturing, media and professional industries.

It reveals 1% of cloud services in use offer both enterprise-grade security and store data within European boundaries, while the remaining 99% either store data in countries lacking in stringent data privacy laws, enterprise-grade security, or both.

In fact, 25 out of 30 top collaboration, content sharing and file sharing cloud services are based in the US, Russia and China-- countries with less stringent privacy laws. The report also notes 49 services track user browser behaviour, leading to watering hole attacks.