While storage titan EMC, HP and IBM are racing towards a competitive edge in the never-ending enterprise hardware wars, cloud backup providers are also seeing their market expand – and competition is growing as a result.

A study by StorageCraft and Symform observed the backup and recovery practices of 600 small and medium businesses–specifically how cloud services fit into the picture.

The majority of the respondents said that the amount of data they’re handling will likely double over the course of the next 12 months. This is driving companies to seek out new solutions that can not only scale effectively but are also cheaper than an upgrade to -premise infrastructure, and the demand is showing. About 300 participants pointed at NAS as their main approach to backup, followed by 42 percent that said they’re using external hard drives, and 35 percent that use a cloud platform to power their doomsday data stash.

Out of the 480 SMBs that leverage secondary backup,  39 percent said they rely on a cloud service; the second most popular choice behind traditional physical hardware such as tape.

“This research validates that small and medium businesses are turning to the cloud in increasing numbers to leverage the agility and ease of management; however, it’s clear there is room for improvement around overall costs and data restore capabilities,” said Margaret Dawson, vice president of marketing and product management at Symform.

The cloud is becoming popular in this particular space as well, in part thanks to innovators that are becoming increasingly skilled at connection the dots. Druva is perhaps the best recent example, after today’s announcement of mobile backup functionality rolling out to its inSync service. It’s a hybrid offering that keeps the data safe while also letting a given worker access documents and other information on-the-go.