All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🚀 Google Cloud has refreshed the Rapid Migration and Modernization Program (RaMP) to incentivize cloud migrations with service credits tied to incremental usage and funded partner and professional services. The program offers enhanced rewards for advanced workloads—SAP, Oracle, VMware, NetApp and data analytics—to help offset higher technical costs. RaMP is positioned to reduce technical debt, accelerate AI readiness by making data accessible to Vertex AI and Gemini, and provide a funded path for assessment and implementation.

🔧Instance Scheduler on AWS now provides enhanced scheduling orchestration that tracks AWS tagging events, informational resource tags for self-service troubleshooting, an optional EC2 insufficient-capacity retry flow using alternate instance types, and automatic creation of a dedicated EventBridge EventBus. These changes re-architect orchestration and fan-out mechanisms to improve scaling performance and address cost-scaling concerns. The update reduces operational overhead and increases workload reliability by empowering distributed engineers to troubleshoot independently and by improving start success in capacity-constrained zones.

🌐 AWS has expanded availability of second-generation Outposts racks to 20 additional countries, enabling customers to deploy AWS infrastructure and services on-premises for low-latency access, data residency, and local processing. These racks support the latest x86 Amazon EC2 instance families (C7i, M7i, R7i) with up to 40% better performance versus first-generation racks, and they introduce simplified network scaling plus a new class of accelerated networking instances optimized for ultra-low latency and high throughput.

🔧 The AWS Transfer Family Terraform module now supports provisioning Transfer Family web apps, offering a branded, managed web portal for users to browse, upload, and download data in Amazon S3. The module centralizes deployment with federated authentication via AWS IAM Identity Center and fine-grained permissions using S3 Access Grants. An included end-to-end example covers Identity Center user and group assignment, Access Grants setup, web app configuration, and CloudTrail auditing.

📚 This free course from Google Cloud and DeepLearning.ai teaches practical use of Gemini CLI, guiding users through installation, context management, extensibility, and specialized workflows. It is designed for developers and non-developers who want to integrate the CLI into daily tasks such as data analysis, content generation, and personalized learning. The curriculum runs in under two hours and provides hands-on lessons covering GEMINI.md, memory features, MCP servers, and extensions.

🛡️ Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports native differential and transaction log restores for instances configured with Multi‑AZ and same‑region read replicas. This removes the prior requirement to convert instances to Single‑AZ before performing differential or log restores. Customers can reduce restore time while maintaining Multi‑AZ high availability and preserving Read Replica read capacity. The feature is available in all Regions where RDS for SQL Server is offered.

🔐 As enterprises outsource more IT and adopt third-party SaaS, recent high-profile breaches show attackers are exploiting vendor trust pathways like help desks, OAuth tokens, and permissive integrations. CSOs should treat vendor selection as continuous risk management and demand strong attestations (e.g., SOC 2 Type II, ISO/IEC 27001), inventories of OAuth/API relationships, and evidence of actual workflow execution. The article lists 13 targeted questions covering controls, notification commitments, testing cadence, isolation measures, and insurance to reduce supply-chain risk.

🚀 Google Cloud has launched a new Bangkok (asia-southeast3) region to deliver low-latency, high-performance cloud services while enabling local data residency under Thailand’s PDPA. The region is part of a USD $1 billion investment and is expected to generate THB 1.4 trillion (US$41 billion) in economic value over five years and support roughly 130,000 jobs annually. It offers certified security controls (ISO/IEC, PCI DSS, SOC), default encryption, customer-managed keys, and direct access to Vertex AI, enterprise Gemini, and generative models to accelerate local AI adoption.

📦 Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) now supports cross-repository layer sharing via a capability called blob mounting. By enabling this registry-level setting through the ECR console or AWS CLI, teams can reuse identical image layers across repositories to accelerate image pushes and reduce duplicate storage. Blob mounting is available in all AWS commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions and is applied automatically during image push operations.

🔁 Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio now supports cross-Region subscriptions and IAM role-based subscriptions, enabling teams to subscribe to AWS Glue and Amazon Redshift tables and views published in different AWS Regions. Cross-Region support helps break down data silos and removes the need for manual replication. IAM role-based subscriptions let users request access without creating a SageMaker project, simplifying governance. These APIs are available via the SageMaker console, Amazon DataZone API, SDK, and AWS CLI.

🔒 The Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact (TEI) study commissioned by Airlock Digital reports a 224% ROI and a $3.8 million net present value over three years for organizations that adopt Airlock’s allowlisting approach. The analysis cites a >25% reduction in overall breach risk and notes zero breaches among interviewed customers after deployment. It also highlights operational efficiency gains — policy management requiring roughly 2.5 hours per week — and reduced administrative overhead thanks to Airlock’s modern, operationally friendly implementation of allowlisting.

🔒 AWS has published its Fall 2025 SOC 1, SOC 2, and SOC 3 reports covering 185 services for the 12‑month period from October 1, 2024 through September 30, 2025, providing customers with a full year of assurance. Customers can download SOC 1 and SOC 2 reports via AWS Artifact, while the SOC 3 report is available on the AWS SOC compliance page. AWS continues to expand the set of services in scope and encourages customers to contact their account team with questions.

🚀 AWS Glue is now available in the Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region, enabling customers to build and run ETL workloads closer to their data sources. The AWS Glue serverless data integration service offers both visual and code-based interfaces to discover, prepare, and combine data for analytics, machine learning, and application development. This regional launch reduces latency, eases data residency compliance, and accelerates time-to-insight for New Zealand workloads.

🚀 Firestore Enterprise introduces an advanced query engine with more than a hundred new pipeline operations available in preview. The update lets developers chain stages for aggregations, grouping, filtering and array unnesting, reducing reliance on mandatory indexes for many queries. It also adds precise index controls, query explain and query insights for deeper observability, and a clearer pricing model aimed at lowering read and storage costs.

🔌 AWS IoT Device Management now offers the managed integrations feature in the Middle East (UAE), enabling local organizations to onboard and manage diverse IoT devices via a single interface. The capability includes device SDKs and protocol support for ZigBee, Z-Wave, Matter, and Wi‑Fi, along with partner cloud-to-cloud connectors and 80+ device data model templates. These tools help developers accelerate integrations for home security, energy management, and elderly care monitoring, regardless of whether devices connect directly, through hubs, or via third-party clouds.

🔐 Microsoft recommends four priorities for identity and network access in 2026: deploy fast, adaptive AI protection; manage and govern AI agents as first-class identities; unify identity and network controls into an Access Fabric; and strengthen identity foundations with phishing-resistant credentials and high-assurance recovery. The post cites Microsoft Entra capabilities and studies showing faster, more accurate admin workflows, and emphasizes applying Zero Trust to agents, networks, and devices.

🖱️ Microsoft released PowerToys 0.97, introducing CursorWrap, a new mouse utility that 'teleports' the pointer to the opposite edge of active monitors to ease navigation across multi-monitor setups. The update also brings major improvements to the Command Palette quick launcher, adding built-in extensions to control other PowerToys, Peek file previews, a Personalization page, and a Remote Desktop extension. PowerToys is available via the Microsoft Store and GitHub.

🔧 Amazon QuickSight has enhanced its SPICE in-memory engine to support datasets up to 2 TB, doubling the prior 1 TB limit, while optimizing ingestion and refresh to reduce time to insight. String length limits have been increased from 2K to 64K Unicode characters and timestamp support extended from year 1400 back to 0001. These capabilities are available in Enterprise Editions across supported regions.

🔔 Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports bare metal instances with Bring Your Own License (BYOL) for Oracle Standard Edition 2. Supported bare metal families include M7i, R7i, X2iedn, X2idn, X2iezn, M6i, M6id, M6in, R6i, R6id, and R6in, offered at a 25% lower price than equivalent virtualized instances. Bare metal provides full visibility into CPU cores and sockets, which may reduce licensing and support costs—consult your legal or licensing partner to confirm eligibility. Bare metal is also available for Oracle Enterprise Edition under BYOL; check RDS pricing and region availability for specific configurations.

🔐 Identity-focused attacks are now the dominant threat, and organizations must pair prevention with deep visibility. Identity Threat Detection & Response (ITDR) provides centralized logging, behavioral analytics, and alerts that reveal suspicious logins, anomalous account activity, and insider risk. tenfold combines Identity Governance and Event Auditing in one platform with lifecycle automation, access reviews, and centralized investigation tools. Book a personalized demo to evaluate capabilities and deployment speed.