All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔒 AWS describes a multi-agent penetration testing capability in AWS Security Agent that pairs LLM-driven reasoning with specialized scanners and browser-based sign-in to automate complex assessments. The design combines baseline scanning, managed static tests, and a guided explorer that dynamically generates contextual attack tasks. A swarm of risk-focused worker agents executes tests and submits structured findings, which are then validated via deterministic checks and LLM-assisted exploit attempts and scored with CVSS to produce actionable remediation reports.

🔔 Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) Managed Instances now integrate with Amazon EC2 Capacity Reservations, letting you apply reserved capacity to managed EC2 compute while ECS handles infrastructure. Configure capacity providers with capacityOptionType=reserved and choose reservation preferences — reservations-only, reservations-first, or reservations-excluded — to balance predictability and cost. Available in all regions and configurable via Console, CLI, CloudFormation, or SDKs.

🔁 AWS Marketplace now supports Concurrent Agreements for SaaS and Professional Services products, enabling multiple active purchases of the same product within a single AWS account. The change removes the prior one-agreement-per-product limitation and lets different business units procure independently with separate terms and pricing. Buyers gain flexibility for mid-term expansions and repeat purchases, while sellers can close multi-unit deals immediately and avoid operational workarounds.

🔁 AWS announced general availability of dynamic dialing mode switching for Amazon Connect Outbound Campaigns, allowing administrators to change between preview and non-preview dialing modes while a campaign is running. Previously, campaigns were locked to their initial dialing mode and required stopping and restarting to change strategy. The new capability lets contact centers adapt dialing behavior in real time to improve agent productivity and campaign efficiency without interruptions. It is available at no additional cost in all supported AWS Regions.

🔒 Amazon CloudWatch Database Insights now provides lock contention diagnostics for Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instances when operating in Advanced mode. The feature visualizes blocking and waiting sessions to highlight the dominant sessions, queries, or objects causing contention and preserves historical locking data for up to 15 months. You can enable diagnostics on PostgreSQL clusters via the RDS console, AWS APIs, or the AWS SDK. CloudWatch Database Insights is available in all public AWS Regions and uses vCPU-based pricing.

🔒 AWS Security Hub Extended is now generally available, offering a single-vendor plan that combines AWS detection services with curated partner security solutions on a pay-as-you-go or flat-rate basis. The plan consolidates procurement and billing—AWS serves as seller of record and Enterprise Support customers receive unified Level 1 support. It centralizes findings in a standard format for cross-tool visibility, reduces manual integration work, and lets organizations add or remove categories such as endpoint, identity, email, network, data, browser, cloud, AI, and security operations without long-term commitments.

🚀 The preview of the Spanner columnar engine enables low-latency serving of Apache Iceberg lakehouse data with Spanner’s horizontal scale and strong consistency. It adds a columnar storage layer and vectorized execution to accelerate analytical scans — Google cites up to 200× faster scans — while isolating heavy analytical queries from transactional workloads. The feature supports on-demand columnar conversion, automatic query routing, and reverse ETL integrations with BigQuery, Databricks, Snowflake and Oracle to make curated analytical data available for real-time applications.

🔐 Amazon Cognito now supports on-demand client secret rotation and lets you bring your own custom client secrets for app clients in user pools. You can maintain up to two active secrets per app client to enable staged rollovers and avoid application downtime during transitions. These lifecycle controls address periodic rotation and migration needs and are available in all Regions where Amazon Cognito user pools are offered; management is supported via the Console, CLI, SDKs, or CloudFormation.

🚀 PayPal completed a multi-year, large-scale migration of more than 300 petabytes of analytics data into BigQuery on Google Cloud to create a unified data foundation for generative AI. The initiative consolidated disparate platforms — including Teradata, Hadoop, Redshift, and Snowflake — and reduced vendor complexity. PayPal automated migration tasks, used live dashboards, and integrated FinOps to maintain zero business downtime while enabling faster queries and much fresher data for AI model training.

🔔 Amazon CloudWatch Observability EKS add-on v5.0.0 now enables CloudWatch Application Signals (APM) by default for new installations and upgrades, removing the previous manual opt-in. The add-on automatically instruments services to collect traces, metrics, and logs, delivering an application-centric view without additional Kubernetes annotations. Users get immediate access to pre-built dashboards and enriched troubleshooting to detect latency, errors, and request traces out of the box.

🚀 Amazon Web Services announced general availability of the Amazon EC2 I8g.metal-48xl storage-optimized instances powered by AWS Graviton4. These instances pair third-generation Nitro NVMe SSDs with the AWS Nitro System to deliver up to 60% better compute and up to 65% better real-time storage performance per TB, while reducing storage I/O latency and variability. They target I/O-intensive, low-latency workloads such as transactional databases, NoSQL engines, and real-time analytics, and offer large memory and local storage configurations.

🖥️ Amazon expanded availability of EC2 M8i and M8i-flex instances to US West (N. California), Europe (Paris), Asia Pacific (Hyderabad), and South America (Sao Paulo). These instances run on custom Intel Xeon 6 processors exclusive to AWS and deliver higher performance and memory bandwidth than comparable Intel-based cloud processors. AWS reports up to 15% better price-performance and 2.5x memory bandwidth versus the prior Intel-based generation, with workload-specific gains over M7i up to 20–60%. M8i-flex targets common general-purpose sizes while M8i supports larger, SAP-certified and bare-metal configurations.

📣 Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) now supports sending push notifications from the AWS Europe (Spain) Region. This expansion allows customers in Spain to deliver messages to major push platforms including Amazon Device Messaging (ADM), Apple Push Notification Service (APNs), Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), Baidu Cloud Push, Microsoft Push Notification Service (MPNS), and Windows Push Notification Services (WNS). With this addition, SNS supports push delivery from 25 regions, enabling more localised mobile, web, and IoT notification workflows and potentially lower latency for Iberian users.

🔒 FortiGate-as-a-Service (FGaaS) delivers full FortiGate firewall capability as a cloud-hosted, consumption-based service running on purpose-built Fortinet hardware in Fortinet-managed, ISO- and SOC 2-certified data centers. It combines the performance and deep inspection of on-prem FortiGate with unified management, FortiGuard threat services, and optional SOC/MSSP-managed operations for faster deployment and predictable OpEx pricing.

🔁Microsoft now enables enterprise users to restore personal settings and Microsoft Store apps from a previous Windows 11 device using the first sign-in restore experience in Windows Backup for Organizations. The update extends support beyond Microsoft Entra-joined machines to hybrid-managed environments, multi-user devices, and Windows 365 Cloud PCs, presenting a one-time restore prompt at first login. Administrators can control and deploy the feature through existing policies via Microsoft Intune or Group Policy, with general availability for devices that installed Windows updates released Feb 24, 2026 or later.

🔔 AWS has announced the developer preview of the Lambda Durable Execution SDK for Java, enabling Java 17+ developers to build resilient, multi-step serverless applications without custom progress tracking. The SDK adds automatic checkpointing, wait primitives that suspend execution for up to a year, and durable futures for callback-based flows. Paused on-demand functions are not billed for duration, and the preview includes samples and guidance to get started.

🔐 FalconID is now generally available, delivering phishing‑resistant, FIDO2-based authentication built into the Falcon sensor and delivered via the Falcon for Mobile app. It replaces passwords, push notifications and one‑time codes with biometric, device‑bound verification and cryptographic domain binding. Authentication decisions are driven by real‑time identity, endpoint and SaaS telemetry to minimize friction while blocking credential abuse. For legacy apps, FalconID offers secure indirect authentication, and when paired with SGNL it enables continuous, risk‑based authorization across environments.

📡 AWS now publishes two CloudWatch metrics — VifConnectionStatus and VifBgpSessionState — for Outposts racks in AWS GovCloud (US‑East and US‑West) where Outposts are available. These metrics show Local Gateway (LGW) and Service Link VIF connectivity and BGP session state (VifConnectionStatus: 1=operational, 0=not ready; VifBgpSessionState: 1–6 from IDLE to ESTABLISHED). View them in the CloudWatch console to set alarms, troubleshoot connectivity, and reduce dependence on external networking tools or cross‑team coordination.

🔒 AWS Security Agent now enables customers to run penetration tests against Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) resources shared from other AWS accounts within the same organization. By using AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM), teams can securely share VPCs from sub-accounts to a central account where an Agent Space performs assessments. This capability simplifies testing across distributed, multi-account architectures and improves visibility into shared network security posture. To get started, ensure accounts are in the same AWS Organization and configure RAM before launching the agent.

🔒 Android is expanding its AI-driven Scam Detection protections for calls and messages, bringing on-device Gemini models to more Pixel and Samsung Galaxy devices. A real-world example describes a Pixel user who avoided a convincing bank scam after receiving a timely Scam Detection warning during the call. Google Messages protections now cover 20+ countries and multiple languages and have improved detection for sophisticated threats like job-offer and romance “pig butchering” scams. Processing occurs on-device, data aren’t stored or shared, and the feature is off by default and excluded for contacts.