All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🌐 Google today announced America-India Connect, a multi-year initiative anchored by a five-year $15 billion AI infrastructure investment in India to expand connectivity across four continents. The program will build a new subsea gateway in Visakhapatnam, add three subsea paths linking India to Singapore, South Africa, and Australia, and deploy four strategic fiber-optic routes between the United States, India, and Southern Hemisphere locations. These investments aim to boost network resilience, capacity, and affordable access to digital services while supporting skilling and government training platforms.

🔍 CrowdStrike describes how combining Falcon Data Protection, Falcon Next-Gen Identity Security, and HR context enables detection of insider threats through multi-layer telemetry correlation, behavioral baselines, and automated risk scoring. The Insider Threat Analytics and User Activity Investigation dashboards surface anomaly hunting leads — rare destinations, first-seen egress, off-hours activity, USB and unusual endpoint transfers — and provide prioritized user risk lists. Workday integration and content inspection improve visibility for departing employees and sensitive data.

🔧Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports the latest Graviton4-based EC2 instance families — compute-optimized c8g, general-purpose m8g, and memory-optimized r8g and r8gd. AWS reports up to 30% better performance versus Graviton3, offering improved price-performance for compute, general, and memory-intensive workloads. Support covers all OpenSearch versions and open-source Elasticsearch 7.9 and 7.10, with expanded regional availability.

🚀 Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports the latest x86-based, storage-optimized i7i instances powered by 5th generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors. i7i delivers up to 23% better compute performance and more than 10% better price-performance compared with prior-generation i4i instances, plus 3rd generation AWS Nitro SSDs for faster, more consistent storage. Storage improvements include up to 50% better real-time storage performance, up to 50% lower I/O latency, and up to 60% lower latency variability. Support is available across many commercial, regional, and GovCloud AWS Regions; check region-specific pricing and availability.

🚀 Amazon Web Services has launched EC2 R8i and R8i-flex instances in Europe (Ireland), powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors exclusive to AWS. These memory-optimized instances deliver up to 15% better price-performance and 2.5x more memory bandwidth versus previous Intel-based generations, with workload-specific gains for PostgreSQL, NGINX, and AI recommendation models. R8i includes 13 sizes including bare-metal and a new 96xlarge, while R8i-flex provides common memory-optimized sizes from large to 16xlarge to help right-size deployments.

🔧 Amazon Bedrock now supports reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) for open-weight models, including openai.gpt-oss-20b and qwen.qwen3-32b. The managed RFT workflow automates end-to-end customization using reward functions that can be rule-based or AI-driven, and integrates with AWS Lambda for custom grading and checkpoint inspection. Fine-tuned models are immediately available for on-demand inference via Bedrock's OpenAI-compatible Responses and Chat Completions APIs, while proprietary data remains within AWS's secure environment.

🔒 Amazon has released Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition 3.12 with MySQL 8.0.44, delivering security enhancements, numerous bug fixes, and availability improvements for Aurora clusters. Administrators can initiate a manual minor version upgrade or enable Auto minor version upgrade during DB cluster creation or modification to receive the update. The release is rolled out in all AWS regions that support Aurora MySQL. Aurora continues to offer built-in security, continuous backups, serverless options, and multi-Region replication.

📅 Amazon Connect now surfaces agent time-off requests directly in draft schedules, so schedulers can see why an agent wasn't assigned on specific days or shifts. This makes it easier to identify coverage gaps before publishing schedules to agents. The addition reduces the need to inspect published schedules or troubleshoot configuration to explain absences. The feature is available in all Regions where agent scheduling is supported.

📈 Amazon now emits resource count metrics from EventBridge Scheduler to CloudWatch, enabling teams to track the approximate number of schedules and schedule groups in an account. The metrics surface usage trends and indicate when you are approaching service quota limits so you can request increases before capacity is exhausted. These metrics are available at no extra cost in all AWS Regions, including AWS GovCloud.

📝 Amazon Connect Cases now supports larger, expandable multi-line text fields on case templates, enabling agents to capture detailed free-form notes and structured data directly within cases. The fields expand vertically to accommodate multiple paragraphs, simplifying documentation of root cause analysis, transaction details, investigation findings, and customer-facing updates. This enhancement is available in multiple AWS regions.

🚀Amazon Web Services has launched the compute-optimized Amazon EC2 C8a instances in the Europe (Frankfurt) and Europe (Ireland) regions. Powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors at up to 4.5 GHz, C8a delivers up to 30% higher performance and up to 19% better price-performance versus C7a. The family offers 33% more memory bandwidth, up to 57% faster GroovyJVM performance, and 12 sizes including two bare-metal options, making it well suited for latency-sensitive and compute-intensive workloads.

🌐 BigQuery now supports global queries (preview), letting you run a single standard SQL statement across datasets stored in different geographic regions without building ETL pipelines. BigQuery orchestrates distributed execution by running region-specific operations, transferring partial results to a chosen execution location, and combining them to produce final results. The feature is disabled by default and requires administrator opt-in and explicit per-user permissions. It respects VPC Service Controls and gives you control over where queries execute to help meet compliance and data residency requirements.

🔐 Android 17 public beta introduces a secure-by-default architecture that tightens app protections and refines developer workflows. The release deprecates the android:usesCleartextTraffic attribute and will block cleartext by default for apps targeting API level 37 without a network security configuration. It also adds a public SPI for HPKE hybrid cryptography, enables certificate transparency by default and introduces install-time permissions for localhost interactions. Large-screen behavior changes, a lock-free MessageQueue and generational garbage collection in ART target performance, while Google replaces the traditional Developer Preview with a continuous Canary channel for earlier feature access and streamlined testing.

🛡️ Azure positions reliability as the primary objective and distinguishes it from resiliency and recoverability. Resiliency keeps workloads operational during faults through architecture, traffic management, and failure-domain choices, while recoverability restores service when disruptions exceed those boundaries. The post maps these concepts to the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework, the Azure Well‑Architected Framework, and specific Azure tools and guidance to help teams measure, validate, and govern continuity.

🌐 Amazon MSK now supports dual-stack IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity for existing MSK Provisioned and MSK Serverless clusters. Customers can enable dual-stack via the Amazon MSK Console, AWS CLI, SDKs, or CloudFormation by changing the cluster Network Type; MSK provisions IPv6-enabled interfaces while preserving IPv4 to avoid service disruption. For Provisioned clusters, use the GetBootstrapBrokers API to retrieve new IPv6 bootstrap broker strings. Dual-stack is available in all Regions where MSK is offered and incurs no additional cost.

🚀 Amazon Bedrock now supports Claude Sonnet 4.6, Anthropic's newest model delivering frontier performance across coding, agentic workflows, and professional knowledge work. Sonnet 4.6 enables faster, high-quality task completion and claims near-human reliability for browser-based automation, at a lower cost than Opus 4.6. Enterprises can migrate from Sonnet 4.5 with minimal prompt changes and deploy it across supported Bedrock regions for search, chat, agents, and domain-specific applications.

🔐 Apple has released an iOS and iPadOS 26.4 developer beta that introduces end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for RCS conversations between compatible Apple devices, with a wider rollout planned for iOS, iPadOS, macOS and watchOS in a future update. The feature is currently in beta and limited to Apple devices and supported carriers. The update also expands Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE), allowing applications to opt in to full protections beyond Soft Mode. Additionally, iOS 26.4 is expected to enable Stolen Device Protection by default and the SDK is available via Xcode 26.4.

🔐 Check Point has been named a Leader in the GigaOm Radar for Cloud Network Security for the third consecutive year. CloudGuard Network Security delivers an open-garden, cloud-agnostic architecture with integrations across 22 public and private cloud vendors, enabling consistent policy enforcement and centralized controls. The solution is positioned for budget-minded IT teams seeking to reduce multi-cloud complexity, maintain geographic compliance, and mitigate AI-powered cyber threats by foreign actors through consolidated visibility and automation.

🧭 I spent a day using Corelight's Investigator NDR to learn how network detection and response supports SOC workflows. The interface prioritized high-risk detections, showed packet-level evidence and MITRE ATT&CK context, and let me dig into suspicious DNS, reverse shells, and exploit tool activity. Built-in GenAI provided step-by-step investigative actions, and integrations with SIEM, EDR and firewalls demonstrated how NDR enriches and correlates network telemetry for faster triage.

🔒 Unit 42 Managed XSIAM 2.0 delivers a 24/7 managed SOC built on Cortex XSIAM and operated by Unit 42 analysts, threat hunters, responders and SOC engineers. Designed to close the gap with machine-speed attacks, MSIAM 2.0 replaces alert-driven models with continuous detection, proactive hunting and ongoing engineering of detections, correlations and playbooks. The service supports native and third-party EDR telemetry, enables pre-authorized full-cycle remediation across endpoints, firewalls, identity and cloud, and includes a Breach Response Guarantee with up to 250 hours of Unit 42 incident response to streamline crisis containment and recovery.