All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔷 CrowdStrike has been named a Customers’ Choice in the 2026 Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer report for Application Security Posture Management, a designation based entirely on verified user reviews. Customers gave CrowdStrike top ratings across product capabilities and the highest score for deployment experience of all evaluated vendors. As part of Falcon Cloud Security, Falcon ASPM connects application, cloud, and runtime signals to prioritize exploitable risk, map dependencies, and reduce alert noise so teams can focus on the most meaningful remediation.

📢 Oracle Database@AWS is now available in CA-Central-1 (Canada Central) and AP-Southeast-2 (Sydney), each starting with one Availability Zone. The service provides access to OCI-managed Exadata systems hosted inside AWS data centers, enabling like-for-like migrations of on-premises Oracle Exadata and RAC workloads. Integrations with AWS services such as AWS KMS for encryption and Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring are supported. Customers must request a private offer from Oracle via the AWS Marketplace and use the AWS Management Console to provision and manage databases.

🔒 Mozilla has added a single, one-click control in Firefox desktop to disable all generative AI features or manage them individually. Rolling out with Firefox 148 on Feb 24, 2026, the Controls let users toggle translations, PDF alt text, AI tab grouping, link previews, and an AI sidebar chatbot. The Block AI enhancements toggle prevents pop-ups and prompts. Mozilla says the change gives users clear, simple choice over AI.

🔒 Microsoft has moved the long-planned phase-out of NTLM into a default-disable posture for Windows 11 and Windows Server. Introduced in the 1990s and largely superseded by Kerberos since Windows 2000, NTLM still appears in many legacy enterprise systems and enables attacks such as NTLM relay. Administrators have been preparing for years, but Microsoft now considers NTLM deprecated and has published a timetable for deactivation to help organizations plan.

📢 AWS has added DeepSeek OCR, MiniMax M2.1, and Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct to SageMaker JumpStart, expanding the set of foundation models available to customers. DeepSeek OCR focuses on visual-text compression and structured extraction from forms, invoices, diagrams, and other dense document layouts. MiniMax M2.1 targets multilingual coding, tool use, instruction following, and long-horizon planning to support autonomous workflows. Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct enhances vision-language reasoning, spatial and video dynamics comprehension, and extended context handling. Customers can deploy any of these models via the JumpStart catalog or the SageMaker Python SDK to accelerate AI application development on AWS infrastructure.

🚀 With Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, customers can now deploy four NVIDIA NIMs — ProteinMPNN, Nemotron-3.5B-Instruct, MSA Search NIM, and Cosmos Reason — with one click. These prebuilt, optimized inference microservices are designed for NVIDIA-accelerated infrastructure and target biosciences and physical AI use cases. They enable protein sequence optimization, GPU-accelerated multiple sequence alignment, large-context reasoning and agentic tool calling, and vision-language planning for robotics. Deployments are accessible from the SageMaker JumpStart catalog or via the SageMaker Python SDK.

🧠 Amazon Lightsail now offers memory-optimized instance bundles with up to 512 GB of RAM across seven sizes, available for Linux and Windows blueprints and both IPv6-only and dual-stack networking. The bundles include pre-configured OS and application blueprints such as WordPress, cPanel & WHM, Plesk, Drupal, Magento, MEAN, LAMP, Node.js, Ruby on Rails, Amazon Linux, Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, AlmaLinux, and Windows. These instances target memory-intensive workloads like in-memory databases, real-time analytics, caching systems, HPC, and large enterprise applications. The new bundles are available in all Regions where Lightsail is offered; check Lightsail pricing for regional costs.

🔐 AWS Security Token Service (STS) now validates select identity-provider-specific claims from Google, GitHub, CircleCI, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for OIDC federation via the AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity API. You can reference these custom claims as condition keys in IAM role trust policies and resource control policies to enforce finer-grained access control and establish data perimeters. This enhancement builds on IAM's OIDC federation capabilities and is available in all AWS Commercial Regions.

🔐 AWS announced that AWS Multi-Party Approval now requires approvers to verify voting actions with a one-time password sent to their registered AWS Identity Center email address. The OTP is a six-digit code that must be entered within 10 minutes of receipt, with up to three attempts allowed. Verification occurs when the approver submits their vote, after they have reviewed request details. Administrators cannot bypass this control via credential resets or authentication endpoint changes.

🛡️ Mozilla will let Firefox users disable AI features globally or manage them individually using a new "Block AI enhancements" toggle arriving in Firefox 148 on February 24. The setting blocks existing and future generative AI tools, suppresses related pop-ups or reminders, and preserves preferences across browser updates. Users can also enable five AI capabilities separately — translations, PDF image alt text, AI tab grouping, link previews, and chatbot sidebars — and the control will first appear in Nightly builds.

🔐 Amazon CloudFront now supports mutual TLS (mTLS) for origins, allowing origin servers to cryptographically verify that incoming requests originate from authorized CloudFront distributions. This certificate-based approach replaces custom solutions like shared-secret headers and IP allow-lists, reducing operational overhead and improving security for public and externally hosted origins. Customers may use client certificates issued by AWS Private Certificate Authority or third-party private CAs imported through AWS Certificate Manager, and can configure origin mTLS via the Console, CLI, SDK, CDK, or CloudFormation. Origin mTLS works with AWS-supported mutual TLS origins such as Application Load Balancer and API Gateway, as well as on-premises and custom origins, and is available at no additional charge.

💰 AWS Network Firewall now supports flexible cost allocation via AWS Transit Gateway native attachments in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, enabling centralized inspection charges to be distributed automatically across accounts. Administrators can create metering policies to allocate data processing costs to application teams based on actual usage instead of consolidating expenses in the firewall owner account. The feature is available in GovCloud (US-East) and GovCloud (US-West) and can be enabled through the AWS Management Console, CLI, or SDK. There are no additional fees beyond standard Network Firewall and Transit Gateway pricing.

🔧 This guide explains how to build custom employee onboarding agents using the Agent Development Kit (ADK), Vertex AI Agent Engine, and Application Integration to connect conversational AI with enterprise systems such as ITSM, ERP, and CRM. It describes a grounded agentic workflow where a Gemini Enterprise front-end captures intent, a low-code Application Integration layer performs deterministic transformations and authentication, and backend systems execute transactions. The result is a role-aware, auditable onboarding experience that automates tasks like laptop provisioning while keeping business rules and approvals intact.

🔐 Single-tenant Cloud HSM is now generally available in the U.S. and EU, offering dedicated, hardware-enforced key isolation for regulated workloads. It provides FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validated Marvell LiquidSecurity HSMs, quorum-based administration, and the ability to revoke Google access to make keys unavailable. Google manages provisioning and high availability while customers retain root key control and can provision clusters in minutes using gcloud.

🚀 Cloud Run now supports NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs in preview, enabling serverless deployment of large inference models such as Gemma 3 27B and Llama 3.1 70B. The GPUs provide 96GB vGPU memory, 1.6 TB/s bandwidth and support for FP4 and FP6 precision. Cloud Run pre-installs drivers, offers rapid GPU startup and autoscaling to zero, and integrates with Cloud Storage and IAP for production use.

📞 Amazon Connect now provides APIs to configure and run tests that simulate contact center voice interactions. You can programmatically set test parameters such as caller phone number or customer profile, call intent, expected responses, and business conditions like after-hours or full queues. The APIs support parallel execution and CI/CD integration to enable automated regression testing. These capabilities help validate workflows and accelerate safe deployments of new customer experiences.

🏥 AWS HealthImaging now supports storing and retrieving lossy compressed medical images using the JPEG XL DICOM transfer syntax (1.2.840.10008.1.2.4.112). This enables applications such as digital pathology whole slide imaging systems to consume native JPEG XL-encoded frames without on-the-fly transcoding. HealthImaging preserves image fidelity, reduces storage costs, and avoids retrieval latency caused by transcoding. JPEG XL support is available in all Regions where the service is generally available.

🛡️ Fortinet has been named a 2026 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Endpoint Protection Platforms, marking its fourth consecutive year receiving the distinction. The recognition is based on verified end‑user reviews through November 2025, yielding a 4.8/5 overall rating and a 98% willingness to recommend from 168 ratings. Fortinet highlights its unified FortiEndpoint agent — combining FortiEDR and FortiClient — to deliver EPP, EDR, ZTNA, vulnerability management, centralized management, and simplified operations with minimal performance impact.

🔒 Microsoft announced a three-stage plan to make NTLM disabled by default and move Windows environments to stronger, Kerberos-based authentication. Phase 1 (available now) introduces enhanced NTLM auditing to identify where legacy authentication is used. Phase 2 (pre-release) will address migration blockers with features such as IAKerb and a Local KDC and update core Windows components to prefer Kerberos (targeted H2 2026). Phase 3 will ship NTLM disabled by default in the next Windows Server and associated client, with policy controls to explicitly re-enable legacy behavior.

⚡ Microsoft has expanded its managed PostgreSQL offerings on Azure to support AI-native workloads by improving performance, scalability, and developer workflows. Azure Database for PostgreSQL now integrates with Microsoft Foundry for in-database LLM calls, offers DiskANN vector indexing for similarity search, and adds Parquet support for direct SQL access to object storage. Developers benefit from VS Code provisioning, Entra ID authentication, GitHub Copilot assistance, and a new Azure HorizonDB service for ultra-low-latency scale-out.