All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

⚠️ Microsoft is investigating an outage that prevents some administrators with business or enterprise subscriptions from accessing the Microsoft 365 admin center in North America and Canada. The company is tracking the issue on its service health page and is collecting telemetry, with an early focus on CPU utilization and user HTTP Archive (HAR) files to identify a root cause. Impacted users report slow or unavailable admin portal access, degraded functionality, and potential inability to open the M365 app or raise support tickets.

☁️This article introduces a pre-built Tines workflow—Investigate AWS issues with CLI data using agents—that brings AWS CLI output directly into cases, removing repetitive console logins and syntax guesswork. A lightweight, read-only agent executes context-aware CLI commands and returns results safely to the workflow. Optional AI-driven formatting or Tines transformations convert dense JSON into concise, human-readable summaries. The template can be imported, connected to an AWS credential, customized, tested, and will append findings into Tines Cases for auditability and team collaboration.

🔐 Microsoft will introduce smartphone-style permission prompts in Windows 11 to request user consent before apps access sensitive resources such as files, cameras, and microphones. The company is also launching a Windows Baseline Security Mode to enable runtime integrity safeguards by default while still permitting targeted overrides for specific apps. These changes are part of the Secure Future Initiative and will roll out in phases with developer, enterprise, and ecosystem feedback. Users and IT administrators will be able to view, grant, or revoke app permissions and will receive clearer prompts when apps attempt to install unwanted software or access protected data.

🔕 Amazon CloudWatch now supports Alarm Mute Rules, allowing teams to temporarily silence notifications for planned deployments, maintenance windows, and off-hours while preserving monitoring visibility. Rules can be one-time or recurring and mute up to 100 individual alarms, with actions configurable for OK, ALARM, and INSUFFICIENT_DATA states. When a mute expires, any previously muted actions are automatically triggered if the alarm remains in the same state it was in when muted. The capability reduces alert fatigue and removes dependence on fragile script-based workarounds.

🔒 On Safer Internet Day, Google and YouTube announced updates to parental controls, wellbeing defaults and educational resources to help kids and teens navigate the online world. Family Link's redesigned interface centralizes device management, screen-time controls and app restrictions, while YouTube simplifies kid account setup, adds Shorts timers and applies age-estimation and default privacy protections for under-18 creators. Additional tools include Android School time, a Gemini Guided Learning mode to promote critical thinking, and the Be Internet Awesome AI literacy guide for classrooms.

🚀 Amazon EC2 C8gn instances powered by AWS Graviton4 are now available in additional regions including Asia Pacific (Seoul, Melbourne), Canada (Central), Europe (Spain), and AWS GovCloud. These instances offer up to 30% better compute versus Graviton3-based C7gn, use 6th-generation Nitro Cards, and deliver up to 600 Gbps network bandwidth. Sizes scale to 48xlarge with up to 384 GiB memory, up to 60 Gbps EBS bandwidth, and EFA support on larger sizes to enable lower-latency clusters.

🔔 Amazon Neptune Analytics is now available in seven additional AWS Regions: Middle East (Bahrain), Middle East (UAE), Israel (Tel Aviv), Africa (Cape Town), Canada (Calgary), Asia Pacific (Malaysia), and Europe (Zurich). Neptune is a serverless graph database that automatically scales graph workloads, reduces operational overhead, and improves AI accuracy and explainability by modeling connected data. It also provides fully managed GraphRAG with Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases and integrates with the Strands AI Agents SDK and popular agentic memory tools to accelerate graph-powered AI development.

🧬 AWS HealthOmics now integrates a Kiro Power and a Kiro IDE extension to accelerate bioinformatics workflow development with AI agent-assisted creation, debugging, and optimization. The IDE extension supports domain-specific languages such as Nextflow and WDL directly in the Kiro interface, offering syntax highlighting, code completion, and troubleshooting guidance. The Kiro Power packages the HealthOmics MCP server alongside steering files and agent hooks to provide domain expertise, automated run analysis, and failure diagnostics for faster, more reliable workflow iteration.

📚 Google offers five concise tips for safer, more effective learning with AI, aimed at students, parents, and educators ahead of Safer Internet Day. Recommendations include setting online/offline boundaries with tools like SafeSearch and Family Link, plus a "School time" mode for focused study. The guidance also stresses critical thinking, spotting AI content with methods such as SIFT and platform signals like About this image and SynthID, while encouraging parental involvement and programs like Be Internet Awesome.

⚙️ Amazon Redshift now lets administrators allocate extra compute specifically for its automatic optimization features, or autonomics, so tasks such as Automatic Table Optimization (ATO), Automatic Table Sorting (ATS), Auto Vacuum, and Auto Analyze can run reliably during peak user activity. This avoids the need to pause or schedule manual maintenance windows. A cost-control setting limits resources for autonomics on provisioned clusters, and the new SYS_AUTOMATIC_OPTIMIZATION system table improves observability for both provisioned clusters and serverless workgroups.

📡 Cloud Observability now accepts OTLP for metrics in Cloud Monitoring, extending prior OTLP trace support. Using OpenTelemetry and the OTLP format, customers can send provider-agnostic metrics via the OpenTelemetry SDK and Collector directly to Cloud Monitoring, with storage and query parity with Managed Service for Prometheus. The rollout unlocks DELTA metrics, exponential histograms, dotted metric names and label keys, direct SDK exports for very high-volume sources, and zero-code auto-instrumentation options.

🛡️ Top CISOs are cutting MTTR and reducing SOC burnout by making sandbox execution the first investigative step. By automating triage and pairing automation with live, interactive analysis, teams resolve routine alerts faster and escalate less. Solutions like ANY.RUN deliver runtime evidence, extract IOCs, and produce concise reports so analysts act decisively without adding headcount. The result: predictable workloads, fewer decision points, and measurable gains in throughput and SLA performance.

📧 Microsoft is investigating an ongoing Exchange Online issue that is mistakenly marking legitimate email messages as phishing and quarantining them. The problem began on February 5 and continues to disrupt customers' ability to send and receive mail. Microsoft traced the fault to a newly introduced URL rule that incorrectly classifies certain links as malicious. The company is releasing quarantined messages and working to unblock legitimate URLs while it completes remediation.

🔎 CrowdStrike has been named a Customers’ Choice in Gartner Peer Insights' 2025 Voice of the Customer for External Attack Surface Management (EASM), and is the only vendor to hold that distinction in both years the report has been published. Falcon Exposure Management unifies external attack surface visibility with internal exposure context, adversary-driven prioritization, and attack-path analysis. The platform discovers known and unknown internet-facing assets continuously, prioritizes vulnerabilities most likely to be exploited, and reduces operational overhead by delivering EASM natively within the Falcon platform. Customers praise its accuracy, continuous discovery, and ability to operationalize exposure insights across teams.

💡 As healthcare organizations layer AI-driven analytics, clinical decision support and automation onto complex IT environments, cloud costs are becoming harder to predict and control. Experts advise combining disciplined FinOps practices with clear cloud cost governance that aligns technical choices with clinical, operational and financial priorities. Key steps include centralized visibility, automation to detect waste, and risk-based workload placement across cloud, on-premises and edge.

🔐 CIAM platforms manage authentication, authorization, consent, and customer identity for public-facing applications. Analysts highlight six leading solutions — IBM Security Verify, LoginRadius, Microsoft Entra, Okta/Auth0, OneLogin, and Ping Identity — each balancing usability, extensibility, and security differently. Offerings range from turnkey, no-code deployments to developer-led, API-first systems and vary in native fraud analytics, FIDO2 support, consent-management capabilities, and integrations with BI/CRM ecosystems. Organizations should weigh marketing data needs, privacy compliance, and fraud protection when choosing a CIAM.

🚀 The Vertex AI team deployed the GKE Inference Gateway, built on the Kubernetes Gateway API, to reduce inference latency and improve cache efficiency without a custom scheduler. The gateway applies load-aware routing—scraping Prometheus metrics like KV cache utilization and queue depth—and content-aware routing that inspects request prefixes to send traffic to pods with warm context. In production this cut Time to First Token by ~35% for Qwen3-Coder, improved P95 by ~52% for a bursty chat model, and doubled prefix-cache hit rates from 35% to 70%.

🔒 Administrators can now configure Amazon WorkSpaces Secure Browser portals to use custom domains, replacing the default portal URL to align browser sessions with organizational branding. After adding the custom domain and routing traffic via a reverse proxy (for example, Amazon CloudFront), Secure Browser redirects users to the configured domain after authentication. Authentication supports AWS Identity Center or a customer IdP with both IdP-initiated and SP-initiated flows, and the feature is available at no extra charge in 10 AWS Regions.

🔒 Amazon ECS Managed Instances is now available in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, enabling customers to run EC2-backed container workloads under regional sovereignty controls. As a fully managed compute option, Managed Instances dynamically scales EC2 instances, optimizes task placement, and performs security patching every 14 days while supporting GPU and network-optimized instance families. Enable via Console, the Amazon ECS MCP Server, or infrastructure-as-code; management fees apply in addition to standard EC2 costs.

🛡️ Google Cloud outlines its expanded Sovereign Cloud portfolio—Google Cloud Data Boundary, Google Cloud Dedicated, and Google Cloud Air‑Gapped—to help governments and organizations retain control of unencrypted data, comply with local law, and sustain critical services. The announcement details regional infrastructure and workforce investments worldwide and legal, technical, and operational controls to limit or challenge external data access. It emphasizes open-source compatibility, client-side encryption options, and flexible deployment models that enable third‑party operators and avoid vendor lock‑in.