All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔎 Ryan Liles describes his role connecting Cisco product teams with independent evaluators to ensure products are tested and validated beyond vendor claims. As part of Talos’ Vulnerability Research and Discovery group, he coordinates third-party testing labs and navigates sensitive conversations about methodology and deployment. Liles stresses calm, fact-focused dialogue and long-standing industry relationships to resolve issues and improve testing outcomes.

📣 Amazon Web Services announced support for partition and sort order definitions in the Amazon S3 Tables CreateTable API, allowing these properties to be set programmatically at table creation. Developers can specify partition transforms and sort order fields directly in CreateTable calls, and the same options are supported in the AWS CLI and AWS SDKs. To use the feature, upgrade to the latest AWS CLI and SDK versions. This support is available in all AWS Regions where S3 Tables are offered.

🔒 AWS Backup now supports single-action cross-Region copies of database snapshots directly into logically air-gapped vaults for Amazon Aurora, Amazon Neptune, and Amazon DocumentDB. This removes the previous two-step process and eliminates intermediate copy storage and related costs, enabling faster recovery point objectives (RPOs) while reducing operational complexity. The capability is available today in all Regions where AWS Backup supports these databases and air-gapped vaults and can be used via the AWS Management Console, CLI, or SDKs.

🔐 Amazon Connect dashboards now offer granular access controls for analytics dashboards, enabling administrators to use resource tags to govern who can view metrics for specific resources such as agents, queues, and routing profiles. You can filter metrics by tags to view aggregates for agents or queues that share the same tags. For example, tagging agents with Department:Customer Service lets managers restrict visibility to that team. Dashboards are available in all AWS commercial and AWS GovCloud (US-West) regions.

🔒 CrowdStrike has been named a Customers’ Choice in the 2026 Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer for User Authentication report. For the second consecutive year it led with the highest volume of verified reviews, receiving 129 five‑star ratings out of 179 responses and a 96% Willingness to Recommend score. CrowdStrike highlights Falcon Next‑Gen Identity Security as an AI‑powered, continuous identity protection solution and notes intent to acquire SGNL to add continuous dynamic authorization and remove standing privileges.

🛡️ This week at the Munich Security Conference, Google Cloud released a whitepaper, "Staying Ahead of the Shadows: Digital Resilience in the Era of AI," that outlines current digital threats and recommends a unified, full‑stack defense to help democracies. It highlights supply‑chain targeting, employee‑focused manipulation, and sustained China‑nexus espionage. The paper prescribes a five‑layer resilience model — Infrastructure, Architecture, Models, Applications, and Security — supported by technologies such as Gemini, Workspace, CodeMender, SAIF, and post‑quantum cryptography.

🔧Azure Copilot introduces an agentic cloud operations paradigm that embeds AI-powered agents into everyday cloud workflows. These agents correlate telemetry, understand operational context, and take governed actions across migration, deployment, observability, resiliency, optimization, and troubleshooting. The service centralizes observability, configuration, and governance so teams can move from insight to action within a unified interface. Built-in controls such as BYOS for conversation history, RBAC, and auditability ensure compliance and preserve human oversight.

🔐 AWS Payment Cryptography is now approved by France’s national card network, Cartes Bancaires (CB), making it one of the first cloud-based payment cryptography services to receive this endorsement. The approval complements existing compliance credentials such as PCI DSS, PCI PIN, and ISO 27001, enabling customers to run compliant payment workloads in AWS without managing HSM hardware. The service is available in multiple AWS Regions and can be accessed via the latest AWS CLI/SDK.

⏱️ Amazon Connect now lets administrators configure After Contact Work (ACW) timeouts per channel for chats, tasks, emails, and callbacks. When an agent's ACW timer expires they are automatically returned to a ready state, enforcing time-boxed post-interaction work. Channel-level settings allow tailored behaviors — for example, shorter ACW for emails and longer for voice — to optimize agent time. This feature is available in all AWS regions where Amazon Connect operates.

🔔 Amazon Connect now supports configurable auto-accept for chat, tasks, email, and callback channels, expanding a capability that was previously limited to inbound voice. When enabled, incoming contacts are automatically connected to available agents, reducing manual accept/reject actions and improving response times. Administrators can set auto-accept at the agent and channel level to balance efficiency and agent readiness, for example enabling it for tasks while keeping voice manual.

🚀 Amazon Web Services has added single-Region Amazon Aurora DSQL clusters in Asia Pacific (Melbourne), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Canada (Central), and Canada West (Calgary). Aurora DSQL is a serverless, distributed SQL database that provides virtually unlimited scalability, high availability, and zero infrastructure management. The service emphasizes the fastest distributed SQL reads and writes to support always-available applications. Aurora DSQL is available in multiple other Regions and can be explored under the AWS Free Tier via the product documentation.

🔍 Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) now provides broker logs for Express brokers at no additional cost. Broker logs help operators troubleshoot client connectivity and availability issues and reveal broker behavior during rebalances and fail‑overs. You can deliver operational telemetry to Amazon CloudWatch Logs or Amazon S3, and enable them via the MSK Console or AWS CLI for new and existing Express brokers. Logs are supported in all regions where Express brokers are available.

📦 AWS announced that AWS Data Transfer Terminal is now available in six additional locations: Seattle and Phoenix (US), London (UK), Paris (France), Sydney (Australia), and Tokyo (Japan), expanding its footprint beyond San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, and Munich. These secure physical facilities let customers upload large datasets directly to Amazon S3, Amazon EFS, and other AWS services over high-throughput connections, accelerating ingestion and enabling immediate analytics and ML processing for media, automotive, financial, and industrial workloads.

🚀 AWS Elastic Beanstalk now offers an official GitHub Action that automates deployments when you push code or configuration changes, simplifying CI/CD for web applications. The action creates applications and environments as needed, packages and uploads artifacts to S3, and manages application versions and environment settings. It supports health checks, deployment validation, configurable exclusions for package contents, intelligent retry logic, and integrates with IAM via OpenID Connect for secure, token-based authentication. The action is available in all commercial AWS Regions where Elastic Beanstalk is offered.

⚙️ AWS Lake Formation now supports enhanced cross-account sharing, enabling centralized permission management for catalogs, databases, tables, and columns across multi-account analytics environments. The update removes prior per-resource association limits by using a single AWS Resource Access Manager resource share with wildcard patterns; administrators should upgrade to cross-account version 5 to adopt the new behavior. Existing shares and Lake Formation APIs remain compatible.

🔧 Amazon MSK now exposes three public topic management APIs — CreateTopic, UpdateTopic, and DeleteTopic — enabling programmatic topic lifecycle operations without running Kafka admin clients. You can use AWS CLI, AWS SDKs, and CloudFormation or the integrated MSK console to create and update topics with guided defaults and view partition-level details and metrics. These features are available at no extra cost for provisioned clusters running Kafka 3.6 and above; ensure appropriate IAM permissions before use.

🔒 Wazuh is an open-source SIEM and XDR platform designed to help organizations build proactive cyber resilience by delivering centralized visibility, continuous detection, and automated response across endpoints, servers, cloud workloads and containers. It collects telemetry via agents, syslog and agentless methods, enabling early detection through log analysis, File Integrity Monitoring and correlation rules. Automated response actions and AI-assisted analysis speed containment and remediation while vulnerability detection and security configuration assessments support ongoing IT hygiene and compliance.

🚀 Amazon EC2 C8i and C8i-flex instances are now available in Europe (Paris), Canada (Central), and US West (N. California). Powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors exclusive to AWS, these instances deliver improved price-performance (up to 15%), and up to 2.5x more memory bandwidth versus previous Intel-based generations. Compared to C7i families, AWS reports up to 20% higher performance and larger gains for select workloads such as NGINX, AI recommendation models, and Memcached. C8i-flex targets common right-sized workloads from large to 16xlarge, while C8i targets memory-intensive and very large instance needs including a new 96xlarge and bare metal sizes. Purchase options include Savings Plans, On-Demand, and Spot pricing via the AWS Management Console.

🚀 Amazon Web Services has made EC2 R8i and R8i-flex instances available in the Asia Pacific (New Zealand) and Middle East (UAE) regions. These instances use custom Intel Xeon 6 processors exclusive to AWS and deliver up to 15% better price-performance and 2.5x the memory bandwidth versus prior Intel-based instances. R8i provides large sizes including a new 96xlarge and SAP certification, while R8i-flex offers common memory-optimized Flex sizes from large to 16xlarge for workloads that don’t fully use compute. To begin, sign in to the AWS Management Console or review the AWS News blog for details.

🔍 The Strategic SIEM Buyer’s Guide recommends that security leaders replace fragmented toolchains with a unified, cloud‑native platform that makes it inexpensive to ingest and retain telemetry, automatically shapes data into analysis‑ready form, and enriches it with graph‑driven intelligence. It highlights accelerating detection and response through real‑time correlation, automated investigation, and adaptive orchestration so analysts and AI can act faster. The guide also stresses rapid time‑to‑value via prebuilt connectors and turnkey content, and cites Microsoft Sentinel as an example of an AI‑ready end‑to‑end platform.