All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🤖 Amazon Quick now supports invoking third‑party AI agents from Box, Canva, and PagerDuty, enabling chat and automation tasks—such as querying documents, generating presentations, and extracting incident insights—directly within the Quick workspace. Quick has also expanded its built‑in actions to include integrations with GitHub, Notion, Linear, Hugging Face, Monday.com, HubSpot, Intercom, and more, allowing users to create issues, summarize notes, and manage CRM workflows without switching apps. Customers can further connect thousands of additional applications using Model Context Protocol (MCP) and OpenAPI connectors. These features are available in all AWS Regions where Quick is offered.

🚀 Amazon has expanded availability of Amazon EC2 M8i instances to the Europe (Frankfurt) and Asia Pacific (Malaysia) regions. Powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors exclusive to AWS, the M8i offers up to 15% better price-performance and 2.5x higher memory bandwidth than prior Intel-based instances. AWS reports up to 20% better performance versus M7i, with workload-specific gains—up to 30% for PostgreSQL, 60% for NGINX, and 40% for deep learning recommendation models. The SAP-certified family includes 13 sizes, two bare-metal options and a new 96xlarge for very large workloads.

🔍 FINRA partnered with Google Cloud to adopt the DORA metrics and a data-first DevOps approach to shorten lead times and modernize its software lifecycle. A DORA workshop revealed lengthy User Acceptance Testing (UAT) cycles as a primary bottleneck, enabling a multi-million-dollar business case for a dedicated sandbox to accelerate testing and deployment. The initiative standardized DORA across teams and targets full adoption within the year.

🔒 Fortinet has joined the ISC2 CPE Submitter program, enabling many Fortinet Training Institute offerings to count as continuing professional education (CPE) credits toward CISSP maintenance. Qualifying activities include NSE certification courses, Fast Tracks, webinars, and other online or in-person sessions; ISC2 recognizes one hour of Fortinet instruction as one CPE credit, up to eight credits per day. Participants must log in to their ISC2 portal and submit the Fortinet course name, duration, and completion date to claim credits.

🛡️AWS describes an automated active threat defense that translates MadPot honeypot intelligence into AWS Network Firewall protections within 30 minutes. The offering integrates with Amazon GuardDuty to surface detections while Network Firewall enforces multi-layered blocks across DNS, HTTP host headers, TLS SNI, and direct IP connections. Using a Swiss cheese model, it stacks inspection points so that if one layer is bypassed, others still interrupt reconnaissance, malware downloads, and C2 communications.

🚀 AWS Lambda now supports creating serverless applications using .NET 10 as both a managed runtime and a container base image, with AWS automatically applying updates to the managed runtime and base image as they become available. .NET 10 is a long-term support release with security and bug fix coverage through November 2028, and it brings features such as file-based apps. The release also adds support for Lambda Managed Instances, enabling functions to run on Amazon EC2 while retaining serverless operational simplicity, and Powertools for AWS Lambda (.NET) supports the new runtime. The runtime is available in all Regions, including AWS GovCloud (US) and China, and you can deploy using the Lambda console, AWS CLI, AWS SAM, AWS CDK, and CloudFormation.

🛡️ Prisma AIRS integrates with Factory’s Droid Shield Plus to secure agent-native software development by inspecting all LLM interactions in real time. The platform monitors prompts, model responses and downstream tool calls to detect prompt injection, secret leakage and malicious code execution. Using an API Intercept pattern, Prisma AIRS can coach, block or quarantine risky inputs and generated outputs before they reach developers or repositories. This native, continuous protection is designed to preserve developer velocity while improving deployment confidence.

⚠ Microsoft is investigating an Exchange Online outage (EX1215307) that intermittently prevents users from accessing mailboxes via IMAP4. Microsoft attributes the disruption to a recent IMAP deployment that introduced a code conflict and authentication misconfiguration, and says a configuration fix has been deployed and is being rolled out. Other connection methods are not affected, and Microsoft advises retries may restore access while the update completes.

🔐 Microsoft will require MFA for all users signing into the Microsoft 365 admin center and will block accounts that do not have MFA enabled starting February 9, 2026. The enforcement covers portal.office.com/adminportal/home, admin.cloud.microsoft, and admin.microsoft.com and follows an initial rollout that began in February 2025. Administrators are urged to enable MFA using Microsoft's setup wizard or official documentation to avoid service interruptions; Microsoft notes that MFA significantly reduces the risk of account compromise.

🛡️ AWS has introduced a simplified onboarding Quickstart for AWS Client VPN that reduces endpoint setup to three required inputs: IPv4 CIDR, server certificate ARN, and subnet selection. The Quickstart provides pre-defined default configurations so teams can create endpoints quickly and immediately download the client configuration to connect. It is offered alongside the existing Standard Setup and is suggested automatically when a VPC is created. The workflow is available at no additional cost in Regions where Client VPN is generally available.

🌐 AWS now enables IPv6 connectivity to IAM Identity Center via newly introduced dual‑stack endpoints. Clients can connect using IPv6, IPv4, or dual‑stack, while existing IPv4-only endpoints remain available for backward compatibility. Dual‑stack endpoints resolve to an IPv4 or IPv6 address based on the client and network, helping organizations meet IPv6 compliance and reduce NAT complexity. Support is available in all Regions where the service operates, except AWS GovCloud (US) and Taipei.

🔒 Microsoft Incident Response expands its proactive offerings to help organizations build cyber resilience and reduce disruption. New services include incident response plan development, major event support, an immersive cyber range, advisory engagements, and compromise assessments for M&A activity. These capabilities build on existing services such as compromise assessments, identity assessment and hardening, and tabletop exercises. The focus is on preparation, gap detection, defense hardening, and tailored threat insights to accelerate recovery and strengthen security posture.

☁️Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA) now supports creating Apache Airflow 2.11 environments and offers support for Python 3.12. Airflow 2.11 introduces trigger-based scheduling for delta intervals and consistent metric reporting in milliseconds to help prepare for an upgrade to Airflow 3. You can launch new 2.11 environments from the AWS Management Console in all currently supported MWAA regions.

🚀 AWS today announced that Amazon EC2 I7ie instances are now available in Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Canada West (Calgary), and Europe (Paris). Designed for large storage I/O–intensive workloads, these high-density, storage-optimized instances use 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors and 3rd gen AWS Nitro SSDs to deliver higher compute performance, lower storage I/O latency, and increased local NVMe capacity up to 120TB. They come in nine sizes with up to 100 Gbps networking and significant EBS bandwidth, targeting low-latency, high-throughput applications.

🚀 The preview release of a fully managed, remote MCP server for BigQuery (Jan 2026) lets developers connect LLM-powered agents directly to analytics data via a standard HTTP endpoint without managing infrastructure. The blog demonstrates step‑by‑step integration with the Agent Development Kit (ADK) and the Gemini CLI, including OAuth client creation and Gemini API key setup, and loading a sample cymbal_pets dataset. It highlights compatibility with popular frameworks (ADK, LangGraph, Claude code, Cursor IDE) and reminds readers to follow AI security and production best practices.

🚀 Starting today, Amazon EC2 C8i and C8i‑flex instances are available in Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo). Powered by AWS-exclusive custom Intel Xeon 6 processors, these instances deliver up to 15% better price‑performance and 2.5x higher memory bandwidth compared with prior Intel-based instances. AWS reports up to 20% higher general performance versus the C7i family, with workload-specific gains — up to 60% for NGINX, 40% for deep learning recommendation models, and 35% for Memcached. C8i‑flex targets common sizes (large to 16xlarge) for cost-efficient compute, while C8i offers 13 sizes including two bare-metal and a new 96xlarge for memory‑intensive or continuous high‑CPU workloads.

🔍 Google Cloud has enhanced Gemini CLI telemetry with pre-configured Google Cloud Monitoring dashboards that provide immediate visibility into adoption, usage patterns, and performance. By exporting data via OpenTelemetry, teams can use out-of-the-box visualizations or analyze raw logs and metrics to build custom views. Setup is simplified through direct GCP exporters and a three-step flow—project ID, authentication and IAM roles, and updating .gemini/settings.json—so telemetry can be live quickly.

🔎 Google has posted a job for AI Answers Quality engineers to verify and improve the accuracy of its AI Overviews, an implicit admission that AI-driven answers on Search can hallucinate and produce contradictory responses. The role aims to validate AI-generated content, improve citation fidelity, and enhance answer quality across the Search results page and AI Mode. The listing arrives as Google increasingly routes users into AI-driven experiences, including updated Discover feed summaries and AI-rewritten headlines. Reported issues range from fabricated company valuations to misleading health advice, highlighting the need for targeted quality work.

🔒 Check Point now supports Google Cloud Network Security Integration, offering a nondisruptive approach to deploying cloud firewalls that minimizes downtime and avoids performance degradation. The integration enables organizations—particularly in regulated sectors such as financial services, healthcare, and government—to scale hybrid network security while preserving latency and throughput. It simplifies deployment, centralizes policy management, and helps maintain compliance without rearchitecting existing networks.

🔍 This contributed webinar from Zscaler Internet Access examines how today’s attacks often run “hidden in plain sight,” abusing trusted tools and developer workflows instead of delivering conventional binaries. The session covers living off the land techniques, fileless “last mile” reassembly via obfuscated HTML/JavaScript, and the risks in CI/CD and third‑party repositories. It explains how cloud‑native inspection, behavioral analysis, and zero‑trust design can restore visibility and surface relevant activity without slowing the business.