Oracle see cloud computing as the way of the future. They have previously announced that customers can run some Oracle products within Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environment. This includes products like Oracle database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Enterprise Linux.
One of the features they promote on their website is cloud backup. This allows users to backup to Amazons EC2 using their backup tool, RMAN (Recovery Manager). This would eliminate the costs associated with handling and storage of offsite backups. According to Oracle, it is simply a matter of using the RMAN SBT interface to backup to the cloud. I seem to recall that SBT was orginally meant for tape (Serial Backup Tape?). Oracle claim that the new Secure Cloud Backup will seamlessly create a secure (encrypted) offsite backup to EC2.
Several years ago, I was looking for an RDBMS to run with a webhost. I considered Oracle but settled for postgres because it had many of the features that I expect from a professional RDBMS. MySQL seemed to lack most of those features.
Today however, it seems that MySQL has grown up considerably. It now offers features like rollback, hot backup, replication, complex sub-queries and joins etc. Of course there is nothing like Oracle's click and point RMAN for backup, but a competitent SysAdmin should be able create a script that gzips a MySQL hot backup (maybe even GPG encrypts it) and stores it on the cloud.