All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔒 Mid-market organizations face a constant tradeoff between necessary security and limited budgets and staff. This article argues for security across the full threat lifecycle—combining prevention, protection, detection, and response—to reduce risk without adding complexity. It highlights how consolidated platforms like Bitdefender GravityZone and outsourced MDR services extend visibility and operational capacity. The goal is stronger coverage with less overhead.

🛡️ Apple has added a Limit Precise Location setting in iOS 26.3 and later that restricts the location information mobile carriers receive via cell-tower connections, sharing only an approximate area rather than a precise street address. The toggle applies to specific models — iPhone Air, iPhone 16e, and iPad Pro (M5) Wi‑Fi + Cellular — and requires carrier support; currently supported networks include Telekom (Germany), EE and BT (UK), Boost Mobile (US), and AIS and True (Thailand). Apple says the feature does not affect Location Services or location sharing with friends and family, and it does not change emergency-call location data; users enable it in Settings → Cellular → Cellular Data Options and a restart may be required.

🔒 Kaspersky's Unified Monitoring and Analysis Platform SIEM v4.2 integrates AI-driven UEBA to model normal authentication behavior and surface deviations such as atypical login times, unusual event chains, and anomalous access attempts. The release also introduces a new, more efficient correlator that processes events faster with lower resource use, a flexible role model for granular access control, and secure event backup and export capabilities. Together these changes aim to reduce false positives, ease SOC operational load, and improve stability under high event volumes.

🌐Amazon RDS now supports IPv6 for VPC endpoints of the RDS Service APIs, enabling dual‑stack (IPv4 and IPv6) connectivity directly within your VPC without traversing the internet. This change expands address capacity, lets you assign contiguous IPv6 ranges to microservices, and provides a safer, phased migration path from IPv4. The feature is available in all commercial AWS regions and AWS GovCloud (US).

🔍 AWS announced integration of Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals with Kiro Powers to deliver AI agent-assisted troubleshooting workflows directly within the Kiro IDE. The Kiro power packages the Application Signals MCP server with curated steering files and hooks, providing focused observability guidance so agents receive only the context needed for a specific task. Developers can accelerate SLO triage and service isolation from hours to minutes with one-click installation across AWS Regions.

🔍 This post explains how to scale AWS Managed Microsoft AD by choosing between scale-up (edition upgrade to Enterprise) and scale-out (adding domain controller instances), and shows how to use Amazon CloudWatch dashboards to monitor directory health. It highlights key metrics—CPU, memory, disk, I/O, network, and DNS—recommended thresholds, and alerting guidance to inform scale decisions. The guidance recommends preferring reversible scale-out for capacity issues and reserving scale-up for Enterprise-only features such as multi-Region replication and large object counts.

⌛ Amazon Connect now provides improved estimated wait time metrics for queues and enqueued contacts, enabling contact centers to set accurate customer expectations and offer options such as callbacks when hold times extend. By integrating with routing criteria and agent proficiency settings, the metric supports smarter cross‑queue routing so customers reach appropriately skilled agents faster. Administrators can use the enhanced visibility for resource planning and workload balancing across multiple queues. This capability is available in all AWS regions where Amazon Connect is offered.

🔒 Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio can now be accessed through AWS PrivateLink, enabling customers to route traffic between their VPC and Unified Studio without traversing the public internet. Network administrators can onboard SageMaker service endpoints to a VPC and combine them with IAM policies to enforce that customer data remains on the AWS network. The capability is available in all Regions that support Unified Studio, giving customers a built-in option for stronger network isolation.

📈 Amazon Elastic Container Service now publishes container health status as a new CloudWatch Container Insights metric. When a task defines a container health check, Container Insights emits UnHealthyContainerHealthStatus (0 = HEALTHY, 1 = UNHEALTHY) and includes health-state details in EMF logs during UNKNOWN evaluations. The metric is available at cluster, service, task, and container dimensions, and customers can create CloudWatch alarms to notify teams of unhealthy containers.

🔍 AWS announced enhanced observability for AWS Lambda Kafka event source mappings (ESM), introducing configurable Amazon CloudWatch Logs and metrics to monitor event polling setup, scaling behavior, and processing state. The capability supports both Amazon MSK and self-managed Kafka, and offers selectable log levels plus metric groups (EventCount, ErrorCount, KafkaMetrics). Customers can view data on a dedicated ESM monitoring page and enable logs and metrics via the Console, Create/Update ESM APIs, AWS CLI, SDKs, CloudFormation, or AWS SAM; standard CloudWatch pricing applies.

🔒 Microsoft announced it will disable NTLM network authentication by default in upcoming Windows Server and client releases, shifting systems toward Kerberos-based and passwordless authentication. The vendor outlined a three‑phase transition: Phase 1 provides enhanced auditing in Windows 11 24H2 and Windows Server 2025, Phase 2 (H2 2026) adds mitigation features such as IAKerb and a Local Key Distribution Center, and Phase 3 will block NTLM network authentication by default. The protocol will remain in the OS and can be re-enabled by policy where necessary.

📈 AWS announced Partner Revenue Measurement, a capability that gives AWS Partners visibility into how their solutions drive AWS service consumption across partner-managed and customer-managed accounts. Partners tag resources with aws-apn-id and values like pc: to attribute service usage to a Marketplace listing. The feature is generally available in all commercial regions and AWS provides an onboarding guide with implementation and tagging best practices.

🚀 Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports cross-Region replicas configured with additional storage volumes, enabling customers to attach up to three extra volumes of up to 64 TiB each alongside the primary storage. When you create a cross-Region replica, RDS automatically mirrors the same storage layout on the replica, and you can modify volumes on primary and replica via the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or AWS SDK without application downtime. This enhancement lets organizations scale database capacity up to 256 TiB and supports promotion or switchover of replicas to meet low RPO and RTO for business-critical workloads.

🎮 Amazon GameLift Streams is expanding streaming availability to six additional AWS regions—London (eu-west-2), Stockholm (eu-north-1), São Paulo (sa-east-1), Mumbai (ap-south-1), Seoul (ap-northeast-2), and Sydney (ap-southeast-2). This expansion, effective Jan 30, 2026, supports all stream classes and increases GPU capacity for game streaming. Developers can add these locations to existing or new stream groups by updating Location and capacity configurations via the console or CLI.

🚀 Amazon EC2 R8a instances are now available in Europe (Spain) and Europe (Frankfurt), featuring 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors with up to a 4.5 GHz maximum frequency. These instances deliver up to 30% higher performance and up to 19% better price-performance versus R7a, plus 45% more memory bandwidth and up to 60% faster GroovyJVM throughput for latency-sensitive workloads. Built on the AWS Nitro System with sixth-generation Nitro Cards, R8a offers 12 sizes including two bare-metal options and is SAP-certified, providing 38% more SAPS than R7a. To begin, sign in to the AWS Management Console and review the instance documentation for sizing and configuration guidance.

🔀 Cloudflare released a Worker template for Vertical Microfrontends, enabling multiple independent Cloudflare Workers to serve a single domain by mapping routes (e.g., /docs, /dash) to distinct teams. The Router Worker leverages service bindings to call specific Workers, rewrites asset paths with HTMLRewriter, and can inject CSS view transitions plus speculation-rule preloads to create seamless, preloaded navigation. Teams keep full stack autonomy while users experience a unified application.

🛡️ AWS outlines core concepts and a hands-on walkthrough for implementing security response automation to detect and remediate threats across AWS environments. The post maps automation to the NIST Cybersecurity Framework and demonstrates a CloudFormation deployment using EventBridge, Lambda, GuardDuty, and Security Hub to automatically restart CloudTrail and notify operators. It also highlights the Automated Security Response library, testing guidance, and cost and cleanup considerations.

🚀 Amazon EventBridge now supports event payloads up to 1 MB, up from the prior 256 KB limit. This enables developers to send richer JSON, telemetry, and large-language-model prompts in a single event without chunking, compression, or external storage. The feature is available in most commercial AWS Regions, with a small set of regional exceptions. Review regional availability and update event-driven architectures to simplify data flows.

🔧 Amazon Bedrock now supports server-side tools in the Responses API using OpenAI API–compatible service endpoints. With Bedrock invoking tools directly rather than relying on client orchestration, AI applications can perform real-time, multi-step actions—searching the web, executing code, and updating databases—within the governance, compliance, and security boundaries of your AWS accounts. Developers may supply custom Lambda functions or use AWS-provided tools such as notes and tasks. Server-side tool use is available today for OpenAI's GPT OSS 20B and GPT OSS 120B in multiple AWS regions, with broader model and region support coming soon.

🔐 Amazon Cognito introduces inbound federation Lambda triggers that let you transform and customize federated user attributes during authentication. You can modify responses from external SAML and OIDC providers — adding, overriding, or suppressing attributes — before they are stored in your user pool to avoid issues such as Cognito's 2,048-character limit per attribute. The trigger is available via hosted UI (classic) and managed login in all AWS Regions and is configurable through the Console, CLI, SDKs, CDK, or CloudFormation.