All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🖥️ Amazon WorkSpaces Personal and Core now include Microsoft Office, Visio, and Project 2024 applications in the managed applications catalog. The release covers Microsoft Office LTSC Professional Plus 2024, Office LTSC Standard 2024, Visio LTSC Professional and Standard 2024, and Project Professional and Standard 2024. Administrators can add these applications to eligible new or existing WorkSpaces using the existing Manage application workflow to standardize a modern, secure productivity desktop. Applications are available in all Regions that support WorkSpaces Personal and Core and will incur per-application charges.

🔔 Microsoft is introducing Brand Impersonation Protection for Teams Calling, rolling out to the targeted release ring in mid‑February and enabled by default. The feature inspects incoming VoIP calls from first‑time external contacts for signs of brand impersonation and displays high‑risk call warnings before suspicious calls are answered. Users can accept, block, or end flagged calls, and alerts may persist during a conversation if suspicious signals continue. IT teams are advised to update support materials and brief helpdesks ahead of the rollout.

🚀 AWS has made EBS-optimized EC2 C8gb, M8gb, and R8gb instances in 48xlarge sizes generally available, with C8gb and R8gb also offered as metal-48xl. Powered by Graviton4, the new sizes deliver up to 30% better compute performance than Graviton3 and offer up to 300 Gbps of EBS bandwidth and 1,440,000 IOPS. They support Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) and up to 400 Gbps networking to improve latency and cluster performance for tightly coupled and high-throughput workloads. New sizes are available in US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon).

🤖 FortiSIEM 7.5 introduces agentic-AI incident management and data sovereignty options to help multinational SOCs balance centralized operations with localized data storage. The release debuts FortiAI-Assist agents — an investigation assistant and a companion assistant — to automate multi-step threat hunting, evidence enrichment, and response guidance. It also includes a free IT/OT Windows agent that requires no centralized management, enhanced federated search, pipeline enrichment, advanced agent templates, and Osquery support for Linux and Windows.

🔒 Hybrid work has driven a sharp rise in Active Directory password resets as cached credentials, inconsistent network connectivity, and stricter rotation policies cause more account lockouts. IT helpdesks supporting distributed employees are inundated with routine tickets that drain resources and reduce productivity. Forrester estimates a $70 cost per reset, and Specops data shows an average organization handles 923 resets annually. Implementing self‑service password reset solutions like Specops uReset can reduce wait times and restore access quickly.

🧰 Microsoft is rolling out AI enhancements to Notepad and Paint for Windows 11 Insiders in the Canary and Dev channels. Notepad now streams AI-generated previews for Write, Rewrite, and Summarize and adds expanded Markdown formatting and a welcome screen to surface new features. Paint introduces an AI-powered Coloring Book for Copilot+ PCs and a fill tolerance slider for finer control. Both features require Microsoft account sign-in and can be disabled or uninstalled.

🛠️ Google SREs describe using Gemini 3 and Gemini CLI to accelerate incident response across the full lifecycle: paging, mitigation, root cause analysis, and postmortems. The CLI integrates with SRE tools (alerting, logs, timeseries, and source control) and selects deterministic, typed actions while enforcing policy to keep humans in the loop. In practice it lowers Mean Time to Mitigation by automating playbook selection, executing safe mutations with approval, and producing fixes and postmortems that are auditable and repeatable.

🔔 Amazon MQ now enables RabbitMQ 4 brokers to connect directly with JMS applications via the RabbitMQ JMS Topic Exchange plugin and RabbitMQ JMS client. The plugin is enabled by default on all RabbitMQ 4 brokers and supports JMS 1.1, JMS 2.0, and JMS 3.1, allowing JMS apps to run without rewrites. The JMS client can also bridge JMS messages to AMQP exchanges and consume from AMQP queues to support interoperability or migration. To use it, select RabbitMQ 4.2 on an M7g instance when creating a broker via Console, CLI, or SDKs; the plugin is available in all regions where RabbitMQ 4 is offered.

🛠 This episode of the Agent Factory podcast showcases Google’s new developer tools: Antigravity, an agent-first multi-window IDE, and Nano Banana Pro, the Gemini 3 Pro image model. Hosts Remik and Vlad demo building an agentic slide generator using the Agent Development Kit, Antigravity’s Agent Manager, and an MCP server, highlighting planning, testing, and high-fidelity image creation.

🔒 Security teams at fast-growing companies must secure collaboration platforms without slowing the business. This piece highlights common native gaps in Google Workspace—from BEC and targeted phishing to legacy protocol exposure and weak OAuth controls—and lists immediate hardening steps for Gmail, access, and data protection. It also outlines how Material augments Workspace with advanced email defense, context-aware account monitoring, and automated data protection.

🚀 This guide demonstrates how to create and deploy a public web app using Gemini 3 Flash Preview via Google AI Studio and Google Cloud Run. In Build mode you describe the application in natural language and let the model "vibe code" a complete app, which appears instantly in the Preview panel for testing. When satisfied, a single Deploy App action pushes the app to Cloud Run, exports your API key as an environment variable, and provides a shareable URL. Note that deployment requires a Google Cloud project with billing enabled.

🔒 AWS now supports connecting AWS Security Agent to GitHub Enterprise Cloud, allowing organizations to apply AI-powered security analysis to private repositories. Customers install the AWS Security Agent GitHub app with required permissions to enable automated code reviews on pull requests, use the agent during penetration testing, and optionally have the agent submit PRs with recommended fixes. This capability is available in US East (N. Virginia).

🔐 Microsoft 365 tenant configurations are the operational blueprint for services such as Entra, Intune, Exchange, Defender, Teams and SharePoint. The piece stresses that Microsoft does not provide backups for tenant-level settings under the shared responsibility model, so restoration is the customer's duty. Lost or altered policies — from conditional access and MFA rules to DLP and retention policies — can disrupt security, compliance and business continuity. Organizations should adopt intelligent configuration backup to maintain a Zero-Trust posture and ensure recoverability.

🔍 Amazon SageMaker HyperPod now surfaces detailed error messages and points directly to the CloudWatch log group and log stream that captured lifecycle script output. You can view these messages through the DescribeCluster API or via the SageMaker console, which includes a 'View lifecycle script logs' button to open the exact CloudWatch stream. CloudWatch entries now contain execution markers (begin, download start/complete, success/failure) to help pinpoint where provisioning failed. This enhancement is available in all Regions where HyperPod is supported and reduces time to diagnose lifecycle script issues.

🔧 AWS Clean Rooms now supports SQL join and partition hints to let analysts optimize join strategies and data distribution. Hints are applied using comment-style syntax in pre-approved analysis templates and ad hoc SQL queries. You can force a broadcast join for small lookup tables or add partition hints for better parallelism. These options improve query performance and can lower costs.

🔎 Amazon Connect now provides automated random sampling of agent contacts to simplify fair quality evaluations. Managers can specify how many contacts to review per agent and define a timeframe (for example, 3 contacts per agent from the last week). New filters let evaluators require audio, screen recordings, or transcripts and exclude previously evaluated interactions. The capability is available in all regions where Amazon Connect is offered.

🔒 Amazon EMR Serverless now supports encrypting local disks with AWS KMS customer managed keys (CMKs), enabling customers to adopt CMKs instead of default AWS-owned keys for greater encryption control. You can use CMKs from the same account or from another account and apply them at the application level or per job run and interactive session. This capability is supported on new and existing EMR Serverless applications across all supported EMR release versions and is available in all Regions, including AWS GovCloud (US) and China.

🔒 Amazon Bedrock is expanding its Reserved service tier to provide predictable, guaranteed tokens-per-minute capacity and prioritized compute for mission-critical workloads. The Reserved tier lets customers allocate separate input and output tokens-per-minute capacities to match asymmetric workload needs and control costs, while automatically overflowing to the pay-as-you-go Standard tier when reserved capacity is exceeded. This offering is available today for Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.5 in AWS GovCloud (US-West) with 1- and 3-month reservation options billed monthly.

🚀 Amazon Web Services has expanded availability of Amazon EC2 C8gn instances powered by AWS Graviton4 to additional regions including Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Africa (Cape Town), Europe (Ireland, London) and Canada West (Calgary). C8gn delivers up to 30% better compute performance versus C7gn and incorporates 6th-generation AWS Nitro Cards with up to 600 Gbps network bandwidth. Instances scale to 48xlarge with up to 384 GiB memory and 60 Gbps EBS bandwidth, and selected large sizes support Elastic Fabric Adapter for lower latency. These instances are aimed at network-intensive workloads such as network virtual appliances, data analytics, and CPU-based AI/ML inference.

🔍 AWS now includes the policy Amazon Resource Name (ARN) from AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and AWS Organizations in Access Denied error messages for same-account and same-organization scenarios. This change surfaces the exact policy causing the denial—covering Service Control Policies (SCPs), Resource Control Policies (RCPs), identity-based policies, session policies, and permission boundaries—so you can identify and remediate explicit denies more quickly. The update will be rolled out across services and regions; consult IAM documentation for details.