All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔔 Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports bare metal instances with Bring Your Own License (BYOL) for Oracle Standard Edition 2. Supported bare metal families include M7i, R7i, X2iedn, X2idn, X2iezn, M6i, M6id, M6in, R6i, R6id, and R6in, offered at a 25% lower price than equivalent virtualized instances. Bare metal provides full visibility into CPU cores and sockets, which may reduce licensing and support costs—consult your legal or licensing partner to confirm eligibility. Bare metal is also available for Oracle Enterprise Edition under BYOL; check RDS pricing and region availability for specific configurations.

🔧 Amazon QuickSight has enhanced its SPICE in-memory engine to support datasets up to 2 TB, doubling the prior 1 TB limit, while optimizing ingestion and refresh to reduce time to insight. String length limits have been increased from 2K to 64K Unicode characters and timestamp support extended from year 1400 back to 0001. These capabilities are available in Enterprise Editions across supported regions.

🔐 Identity-focused attacks are now the dominant threat, and organizations must pair prevention with deep visibility. Identity Threat Detection & Response (ITDR) provides centralized logging, behavioral analytics, and alerts that reveal suspicious logins, anomalous account activity, and insider risk. tenfold combines Identity Governance and Event Auditing in one platform with lifecycle automation, access reviews, and centralized investigation tools. Book a personalized demo to evaluate capabilities and deployment speed.

🚀 Amazon EC2 G7e instances are now generally available, powered by NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs. G7e delivers up to 2.3x inference performance versus G6e and supports configurations with up to 8 GPUs (96 GB each), 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors, 192 vCPUs, and up to 1600 Gbps of Elastic Fabric Adapter networking. Designed for LLMs, multimodal and spatial computing workloads, G7e includes NVIDIA GPUDirect P2P and RDMA support in EC2 UltraClusters and is available in US East (N. Virginia) and US East (Ohio) as On‑Demand, Spot, or via Savings Plans.

📊 Amazon QuickSight now lets dashboard readers customize tables and pivot tables directly within dashboards, including adding or removing fields, changing aggregations, and modifying formatting without requiring updates from dashboard authors. These in-dashboard edits enable users to tailor views for specific analyses—for example, sales managers can add revenue breakdowns by category while finance teams switch aggregations from sum to average. The features are available in Enterprise Edition across all supported QuickSight regions; see the AWS blog for usage guidance.

🚀 AWS has expanded support for Graviton4-based R8g, plus R7g and R7i, across additional regions for Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS. The launch adds R8g availability in Hong Kong, Osaka, Jakarta, Seoul, Singapore and Canada (Central), with R7i in Hyderabad and R7g in Cape Town. Graviton4 instances deliver up to 40% higher performance and up to 29% better price/performance versus Graviton3, and introduce 24xlarge/48xlarge sizes (up to 192 vCPUs) with DDR5, high networking, and enhanced EBS bandwidth. Instances can be launched via the RDS console or AWS CLI; consult engine-version documentation and RDS pricing for details.

🔁 Amazon RDS Blue/Green Deployments now provide faster switchover for single-Region configurations, typically reducing writer-node downtime to five seconds or lower. Applications using the AWS Advanced JDBC Driver typically see cutovers of two seconds or lower because DNS propagation delays are avoided. The enhancement supports Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS engines — including PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB — in all AWS Regions, and you can apply changes such as major engine upgrades, maintenance updates, and instance scaling via the Amazon RDS Console or CLI in a few clicks.

🔍 Amazon has expanded CloudWatch Database Insights on-demand analysis to four additional Regions: Asia Pacific (New Zealand), Asia Pacific (Taipei), Asia Pacific (Thailand), and Mexico (Central). The on-demand experience uses machine learning to compare selected time periods against normal baselines, detect anomalies, and provide targeted remediation guidance. Administrators can enable Advanced mode for Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS via the RDS console, APIs, SDKs, or CloudFormation to accelerate diagnosis and resolution.

🛡️ The EU-backed GCVE has launched a free, public vulnerability database at db.gcve.eu to reduce reliance on U.S.-centric CVE identifiers and strengthen European digital sovereignty. Using a decentralized GNA model and aggregating more than 25 public sources, the platform normalizes and indexes vulnerability data to allow autonomous assignment and publication of identifiers without central approval. An open API supports integration with compliance and risk tools so security teams, vendors, and researchers can track and assess reports across ecosystems.

🛠 Amazon Elastic VMware Service (Amazon EVS) now lets administrators specify supported combinations of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and ESX software versions when provisioning environments and hosts. You can designate a VCF version with the CreateEnvironment API, select an ESX version when adding hosts via CreateEnvironmentHost, and query valid pairings with the GetVersions API. AWS also adds support for new environment deployments using VCF 5.2.2 to broaden compatibility.

🔒 Web browsers remain a primary enterprise attack surface, and the market for secure browsers is maturing as vendors and hyperscalers fold browser isolation into broader security platforms. The article summarizes evaluation criteria — from MFA, isolation and DLP to extension control, logging and anonymous surfing — and highlights recent consolidation and vendor offerings. It emphasizes integration, support and cost tradeoffs when choosing a deployment mode.

⚠️ Microsoft is enforcing new Intune MAM security requirements beginning January 19 (or shortly after), requiring updated iOS SDKs/wrappers and an updated Android Company Portal to keep apps running. Enterprises that don’t update wrapped or SDK-integrated apps — including Outlook and Teams — risk having those apps blocked from launching. Admins should rebuild or rewrap affected apps, push updates, enable conditional launch policies, and monitor App Protection Status to avoid user outages.

🔐The new GCVE database at db.gcve.eu is a free, publicly accessible repository designed to simplify vulnerability reporting and management across Europe. It aggregates normalized data from more than 25 public sources and uses the GCVE Numbering Authority (GNA) model to enable decentralized assignment of identifiers. An open API allows seamless integration into compliance and risk-management tools for security teams, vendors, researchers, CSIRTs, and open-source developers.

🔒 Google Chrome now allows users to delete the local AI models that power the Enhanced Protection feature, which received AI upgrades last year. The device-hosted model performs real-time scans of sites, downloads, and extensions to flag potentially dangerous content. Researcher Leopeva64 spotted a new control in Chrome Canary; to remove the model, go to Settings > System and turn off "On-device GenAI." Google will roll the option to stable channels soon.

📰 OpenAI said it will begin showing ads in ChatGPT to logged-in adult U.S. users in both the free and ChatGPT Go tiers in the coming weeks, with ads appearing at the bottom of conversations. The company emphasized that ads will be clearly labeled, will not influence chatbot responses, and that user conversations will not be sold to advertisers. Users can dismiss ads and opt out of personalization, while paid tiers (Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise) will remain ad-free.

🔒 AppGuard critiques heavy reliance on AI-enhanced detection and promotes a controls-first, default-deny approach to shrink the endpoint attack surface. CEO Fatih Comlekoglu argues that AI-driven detection cannot "parse infinity," leaving defenders overwhelmed by alerts as organizations limit data ingestion. AppGuard positions its controls-based agent as requiring 10–100× fewer policy rules while auto-adapting to endpoint changes and malware techniques. The company has reopened an Insider Release for MSSPs and experienced operators to test its reengineered lightweight agent and cloud console.

📰 OpenAI confirmed that ChatGPT will begin showing ads inside answers in the coming weeks, likely displayed at the bottom and clearly labeled. Ads will appear only to free account holders and the ChatGPT Go tier; Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise subscribers will not see them. The company says ads will not influence responses, advertisers will not receive conversation data, and users can control or delete ad-related data. Ads will also be excluded from chats on sensitive topics such as health, mental health, and politics.

🚀 AWS has expanded availability of its EC2 High Memory U7i instances into additional regions. New placements include U7i-6tb.112xlarge in Asia Pacific (Thailand, Sydney, Singapore), Canada (Central) and AWS GovCloud (US‑East); U7i-8tb.112xlarge in South America (Sao Paulo); and U7in-16tb.224xlarge in AWS GovCloud (US‑East). These 7th‑generation instances use custom 4th‑gen Intel Xeon (Sapphire Rapids), provide 6–16 TiB of DDR5 memory, up to 896 vCPUs, 100–200Gbps networking, EBS throughput and ENA Express, and are targeted at mission‑critical in‑memory databases such as SAP HANA, Oracle and SQL Server.

🔒 This post outlines a practical technical approach to implementing data governance on AWS, focusing on monitoring, preventive controls, automated remediation, and advanced features such as data sovereignty and lifecycle management. It recommends an event-driven model using CloudTrail, EventBridge, Lambda, and AWS Config to validate and enforce tagging and security controls. The guidance covers organization-wide tag policies, ABAC with IAM conditions, multi-account strategies, and integration with on-premises governance via Service Catalog and compliant CloudFormation products.

🔒 This post outlines an automation-first approach to implementing data governance on AWS, aimed at teams starting new or improving existing frameworks. Part 1 focuses on strategy, a practical data classification framework, and tag governance as foundational elements. It details prerequisites (Organizations, CloudTrail, Config, IAM), organizational roles, KPIs, and recommended mandatory and optional tags to enable automated controls and continuous monitoring.