All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🏆 Check Point Software Technologies announced the 2025 EMEA Partner Award winners, celebrating partners that deliver AI‑powered, prevention-first cyber security outcomes. The winners were honored at the EMEA Sales Kickoff in Vienna, attended by more than 1,000 employees and partners. As the threat landscape accelerates with AI‑enhanced attacks and hybrid‑cloud complexity, these top-performing partners are helping organisations strengthen resilience, meet regulatory demands, and operationalise advanced prevention through collaboration and integrated solutions.

🧭 Antigravity and Gemini CLI offer two complementary approaches for running agent-driven workflows. Antigravity delivers an approachable, graphical experience with an Agent Manager, in-browser application views, guided walkthroughs, and a native debugger for inspecting stack traces. Gemini CLI is terminal-first, installs via npm (npm install -g @google/gemini-cli, requires Node.js), supports headless/CI-friendly execution, and can call local tools like gh or gcloud. Both are extensible with MCP and Agent Skills, and both provide generous free tiers so teams can evaluate which workflow best fits their needs.

🤖 Amazon Redshift now extends its autonomics capabilities to multi-cluster environments, enabling automatic optimization across distributed warehouses. Features such as Automatic Table Optimization, Automatic Table Sorting, Auto Vacuum, and Auto Analyze now consider query patterns from all consumer clusters when adjusting table layouts and maintenance. A denylist lets operators exclude specific endpoints or AWS accounts from influencing optimizations. These enhancements are available at no extra cost in all Regions that support Amazon Redshift.

🔒 The Eclipse Foundation will require pre-publish security checks for extensions submitted to the Open VSX Registry, moving from reactive takedowns to proactive vetting. The staged rollout uses February 2026 to monitor uploads without blocking to tune detections and reduce false positives, with enforcement beginning in March 2026. The checks aim to flag name or namespace impersonation, accidentally published credentials, and known malicious patterns, quarantining suspicious uploads for manual review.

🔍 AWS Batch now returns a statusSummary for Array Jobs in the ListJobs API response, providing a single-call view of child job counts across states such as SUBMITTED, PENDING, RUNNABLE, STARTING, RUNNING, SUCCEEDED, and FAILED. The response also includes a statusSummaryLastUpdatedAt timestamp to indicate freshness. This eliminates extra DescribeJobs calls and streamlines monitoring of large-scale parallel workloads.

🔁 Amazon now enables replication of DynamoDB global tables across multiple AWS accounts and Regions, allowing automatic, multi-Region, multi-account table synchronization. This supports stronger fault tolerance and higher availability during account-level disruptions while enabling workload isolation and distinct security and governance controls. The feature is available in all AWS Regions and follows existing global tables pricing.

🌍 AWS Marketplace now provides a localized purchasing experience for EMEA customers procuring Professional Services through the AWS EMEA Marketplace Operator. Buyers can use local payment methods such as SEPA direct debit and will receive invoices issued by AWS EMEA, removing cross-entity remittance hurdles. The capability simplifies procurement, supports billing consolidation, and is available now for eligible EMEA purchases.

🔗 Amazon has introduced an enhanced console experience for Amazon RDS that consolidates connection details and tools into a single, context-aware view. The interface generates ready-made code snippets for Java, Python, Node.js and command-line utilities like psql, and automatically adapts snippets to the database's authentication settings (for example, using token-based connections when IAM authentication is enabled). It also embeds CloudShell for direct in-console access and is available for Aurora and RDS engines across all commercial AWS Regions.

🆕 AWS Lake Formation is now available in the Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region, enabling centralized control of fine-grained data access and secure data sharing within and beyond organizations. The service integrates with the AWS Glue Data Catalog so users can discover and govern datasets. Supported analytics and ML consumers include Amazon EMR, Amazon Redshift, AWS Glue, Amazon QuickSight, and Amazon Athena.

🔒 Palo Alto Networks has partnered with the RAF Association to modernize its cybersecurity with a secure-by-design, zero trust architecture. The engagement consolidates legacy controls into a unified platform using Prisma SASE, Cortex XDR and Strata Cloud Manager with AIOps to improve visibility, automate operations and protect sensitive beneficiary data. The initiative prioritizes operational resilience and scalable, cost‑efficient support.

🔁 Amazon Connect introduces an integrated appeals workflow that lets agents contest performance evaluations directly within the Connect UI. Agents can submit reasoning and cite specific examples when they disagree with scores, such as contested active listening ratings. Designated managers receive automated email notifications, can review appeals, and track resolution status across all regions where Amazon Connect is offered.

🧮 Aurora DSQL now supports creating indexes on the NUMERIC data type, allowing NUMERIC columns to be used in primary keys and secondary indexes. This change targets workloads that require high-precision values such as currency amounts, scientific measurements, and statistical datasets. The feature is available in all Regions where Aurora DSQL is offered and is intended to improve query performance for operations that sort, filter, or join on precise numeric values. Customers should test index impact on storage and write performance with representative workloads.

ℹ️ AWS announced general availability of displaying the account name in the AWS Management Console navigation bar across all public Regions. The new account name display lets authorized users visually identify and distinguish accounts at a glance rather than relying solely on numeric account IDs. The capability is available at no additional cost; administrators must enable it by applying the appropriate managed policy before users will see the name in the console.

🔒 Microsoft’s SDL is expanding to secure AI-powered systems by treating AI risks as dynamic, cross-disciplinary challenges rather than a static checklist. The update highlights AI-specific threats—prompt injection, data poisoning, memory and cache leakage, and malicious tool interactions—and stresses the need for telemetry-driven detection and faster feedback loops. Microsoft emphasizes developer-friendly policy, automation, and collaborative threat modeling to integrate security into everyday engineering practice.

🔔 Google Cloud has announced General Availability of Unified Maintenance, a centralized dashboard for tracking planned maintenance across its services. The dashboard aggregates events for Compute Engine, GKE, Cloud SQL, Memorystore, AlloyDB, and Looker, providing a single view of upcoming work. It delivers standardized alerts via Cloud Logging, enabling integration with existing monitoring and ticketing systems, and clearly marks events that offer user controls.

🔁 AWS announced multi-Region replication for IAM Identity Center, enabling automatic copying of identities, entitlements, and configuration from a primary Region to customer-selected additional Regions. The feature preserves access during primary-Region disruptions and allows application deployment in Regions that support data residency or proximity requirements. Available in 17 enabled-by-default commercial Regions for organization instances connected to external IdPs, it requires a multi-Region customer-managed KMS key and incurs standard KMS charges; IAM Identity Center is provided at no extra cost.

🗺️ Authors can now resolve ambiguous locations directly on map visuals in Amazon Quick Suite using Quick Sight. When place names occur in multiple regions—examples include cities like Springfield or Abbeville—authors may disambiguate by adding supporting geospatial fields to create location hierarchies, searching the product’s geographic database, or entering precise latitude/longitude coordinates. The feature presents clear status indicators (Unmatched, Matched, Unused) and resolution actions accessible from map visuals. It is available in all regions that support Quick Sight, and documentation plus a blog post provide guidance on maps and geospatial charts.

🚀 Cloudflare has launched R2 Local Uploads in open beta to speed global writes by first writing object data to storage near the client and then asynchronously replicating it to the bucket's home region. Uploads remain strongly consistent and immediately accessible after the initial write, and private-beta tests show up to a 75% reduction in Time to Last Byte for cross-region uploads. Enable Local Uploads via the Cloudflare Dashboard or with Wrangler; there is no additional charge beyond standard Class A operation costs.

🔐 Microsoft has the technical ability to release BitLocker recovery keys to the FBI when presented with appropriate court orders, a capability reportedly exercised roughly twenty times per year. While users can keep recovery keys only on their own devices, Microsoft advises storing them on its servers for convenience. That cloud backup simplifies recovery after lost credentials or device lockouts but also makes keys accessible to law enforcement through subpoenas or warrants.

🛡️ CrowdStrike Falcon achieved a perfect 100% across detection, protection, legitimate accuracy and total accuracy in SE Labs’ October 2025 Enterprise Advanced Security (EDR) Ransomware test, with zero false positives. The evaluation used 649 ransomware samples and simulated attacks modeled on 11 real threat groups, using both direct and deep attack chains. SE Labs awarded Falcon its AAA certification for Advanced Security EDR Protection for this performance.