Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

Yandex, the Russian search engine, has taken its cloud storage product out of its invite-only beta. Like Box or Dropbox, Yandex.Disk offers users access to their files from any device, including their Apple and Android phones. Users will get 10 GB of storage for free.

Yandex, Russian’s largest search engine, has launched its own cloud storage product and will offer up to 20 gigabytes of storage for free. The service, called Yandex.Disk functions like Dropbox and Box, and comes immediately with 10 GB of storage. You can get more if you spam invite your friends…

Grazed from AutomationWorld. Author: Editorial Staff.

The cloud-computing concept has garnered headlines over the past few years through it’s application by giants like Amazon.com, but has made few solid inroads in the industrial sector. That may soon change as IT groups increasingly embrace the idea of cloud computing.

With more than half of IT professionals across industries saying there are significant business benefits to the use of cloud computing, it’s now safe to say that the concept has reached an important acceptance milestone. Unless something dramatic occurs to inhibit wider implementation of the technology in manufacturing in the next few years, I predict that its implementation will follow much the same path as industrial Ethernet has over the last several years…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Paul Krill.

Oracle is finding its road map for enterprise Java is a bit too ambitious, with the company now proposing a postponement in cloud computing capabilities that had been anticipated for Java EE (Java Platform, Enterprise Edition) 7 next year. Instead, the cloud capabilities would be included in Java EE 8 in 2015.

In a blog post, Oracle’s Linda DeMichiel cites slow progress in developing cloud technologies due to immaturity in the provisioning, multitenancy, and elasticity spaces, as well as in application deployments. Providing solid support for standardized PaaS (platform as a service) programming and multitenancy would delay Java EE 7 until spring 2014, more than a year behind schedule, she said. "In our opinion, that is way too long," said DeMichiel, who has served as Java EE 7 specification lead…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Rick Blaisdell.

The most common meaning of the term cloud computing refers to the delivery of scalable IT resources over the Internet as opposed to hosting and operating those resources locally. Cloud computing enables your company to react faster to the needs of your business, while driving greater operational efficiencies.

Cloud computing has a great impact on business thinking. It facilitates a change in the way companies operate, by offering shared and virtualized infrastructure that is easily scalable. It is also changing how we manage these resources. The challenge is no longer about how many physical servers a company has, but more about being able to manage these virtual resources…

Grazed from Sun Star. Author: Editorial Staff.

A serial entrepreneur from Silicon Valley, who is also a proud Filipino, allayed fears on Thursday that cloud computing threatens corporate security, saying it’s more solid than non-cloud environment.

Cloud computing is currently considered as one of the most significant shifts in information technology, promising cost-efficient applications and data that the public can use from the Internet like Facebook and Twitter…

Grazed from The Guardian. Author: Editorial Staff.

We are conditioned to expect everything faster, better and cheaper. In short, impatience has become the new 21st century virtue and influences all aspects of business, particularly when it comes to technology. When we switch on our computers, we expect the web page or the video we want to be served up immediately. The arrival of fibre optic network links delivered just that – access to the worldwide web at the speed of light. This opened the door to cloud computing and, with it, high expectations of accessing cloud platforms from any location in an instant.

However, fibre’s ability to deliver at the "speed of light" doesn’t automatically equate to all applications being delivered in this manner. It’s the makeup of the cloud that makes it fast – its location, type and technology dictate whether those pulling down information from the cloud find themselves in the slow or fast lane. So how can organisations guarantee lightening speed access to their cloud-based, business-critical information?…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Editorial Staff.

For Microsoft and VMware, the high-stakes effort to supply management software for the virtualized data center continues, with both companies now using some of the same terminology. But the similarities stop with talk. The two competitors have very distinct points of view on how to build out the enterprise private cloud.

At a virtual event Tuesday, Satya Nadella, President of Microsoft’s server and tools business, released Windows Server 2012 as an operating system "built from the cloud up." Nadella said Windows Server 2012 can be used to power both Microsoft’s public Azure Cloud and Microsoft customers’ private clouds…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Kognitio, driving the convergence of Big Data, in-memory analytics and cloud computing, today announced that Kognitio Cloud, its innovative analytical platform, has been selected by PlaceIQ to help marketers more effectively target their messaging to smartphone users, based on factors such as their location and the time of day.

PlaceIQ, which has partnered with companies such as The Weather Channel, Verve Wireless and Jumptap, extracts intelligence from large amounts of place, social and mobile location-based data to create hyper-local, targetable audience profiles, giving advertisers the power to connect with consumers at the right place, at the right time, with the right message. These anonymous audience profiles provide powerful targeting opportunities for advertisers…

Grazed from New York Times. Author: Quentin Hardy.

Microsoft just went further into the cloud. The Redmond, Wash., software giant announced Tuesday the new version of its computer server software. The product, called Windows Server 2012, is designed both to work independently and to connect with some 200 online services that Microsoft offers through its Azure cloud computing system. That is in addition to the usual upgrades in things like storage and networking capability.

While expected, this is a pretty big deal, and not just because the servers business is Microsoft’s second largest division in terms of revenue. (It brought in $18.7 billion in the fiscal year that ended last June 30.) It may be the most significant effort to date in Microsoft’s plan to change with the times…