SAP’s Business All-in-One enterprise software is now certified for deployment on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. The software, which lets companies manage business operations across industries, mostly resides within the confines of an organisation’s IT infrastructure.

In an announcement Friday, SAP and AWS said the certification, which applies to Windows and Linux AWS instances, will allow companies to quickly implement SAP’s business software on Amazon’s platform without spending on IT infrastructure.

According to VMS, a German consulting firm, running SAP applications on AWS provides infrastructure cost savings of up to 69 per cent compared to the housing the same software on-premise. …

Yesterday was not a regular day for the Internet. When I tried to check my tweets in the morning, I found that Hootsuite, the browser-based social media management tool, was down. Oh well, I thought, maybe Reddit will get me some interesting links instead. But to my horror, it was suffering from an outage as well.

Then came the straw that broke the camel’s back and convinced me that something, somewhere is terribly wrong: I couldn’t check in to anywhere on Foursquare!

It turned out to be an issue with Amazon EC2, a cheap and scalable cloud service that many, many websites and services depend on for their hosting. On top of the above-mentioned Hootsuite, Reddit, and Foursquare, other sites affected include Q&A site Quora, location-based mobile game SCVNGR, iPad music app Discovr, social media monitoring app Wildfire, and more. …

The lucrative public compute cloud market is heating up, and a new challenger has entered the fray.

Tata Communications just launched Instacompute in Asia Pacific yesterday, a scalable, pay-as-you-use compute cloud that is closely similar to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offering here in the region.

Except that Tata Communications claims that it offers a better, more robust service as they are building Instacompute on their global network infrastructure.

Said Vinod Kumar, managing director and CEO of Tata Communications at the press launch yesterday: “Other traditional cloud providers buy their networks, but we own the network on which the data is run.”

Being a global telecommunications player with good connectivity depth in Asia – especially in India – Tata Communications hopes that their network links as a telco will give them a leg up in the public cloud brawl, especially in terms of network reliability and reach.

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Public clouds just don’t cut it when it comes to mission critical applications that form the backbone of your business. Security concerns, especially when you’re dealing with sensitive customer data like building security drawings, could also put a damper on any cloud computing strategy.

You could try to build a “private cloud“, though the term could be misleading, depending on your definition of cloud computing.

In May, Amazon Web Services senior vice president Andy Jassy noted that private clouds usually incur “very high fixed cost and lack the benefits of the cloud. Companies still own all the capital expenditure, data centers, servers; it’s not pay as you go and it’s not truly elastic on the company level because you still own and manage the infrastructure by yourself.” …

With all the buzz surrounding cloud computing today, enterprises large and small may still be grappling with what the term really means for their business.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) senior vice president Andy Jassy took the opportunity to demystify some misconceptions about cloud computing and its benefits to enterprises as part of the IDA Distinguished Speaker Series on Thursday. AWS also announced its first Asia-Pacific Region in Singapore. …