All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔍 Amazon Inspector now supports Java Gradle dependency inventory and vulnerability scanning for Lambda functions and ECR images, using gradle.lockfile content to build Java dependency inventories. The release also adds detection for MySQL, MariaDB, PHP, Jenkins-core, 7zip (Windows), Elasticsearch, and Curl/LibCurl. These enhancements improve detection of packages installed outside package managers, broadening coverage across languages and runtimes and helping teams reduce blind spots. The new capabilities are available today in all AWS Regions where Amazon Inspector is offered.

🔒 Anthropic is expanding Claude into healthcare with HIPAA-ready enterprise tools and new healthcare-specific connectors. It can access the CMS Coverage Database to check Medicare coverage rules, support prior authorization, and look up ICD-10 codes. Anthropic says deployments can help revenue cycle, credentialing, and reduce claim errors.

🏥 Microsoft announced Claude for Healthcare and Life Sciences is now available in Microsoft Foundry, bringing Anthropic’s Claude models into an Azure-backed, enterprise-grade platform for regulated health and research environments. The release emphasizes domain-tuned agents, model context protocols (MCPs), connectors, and skill libraries designed to support multi-step clinical and R&D workflows. Microsoft highlights specific applications such as prior authorization automation, claims appeal processing, care coordination triage, and life-sciences tasks from protocol design to bioinformatics. The offering underscores governance, safety investments, and flexible deployment options across regulated settings.

📚 Microsoft will retire the Send Documents to Kindle option in Microsoft Word, with the change rolling out after February 2026. The feature, formerly accessible from Word's Export menu, allowed .doc and .docx files to be transferred to a user's Kindle library while preserving page layout and most formatting. Microsoft notes that comments and tracked changes were not preserved when files were sent. After the retirement, users should use the Send to Kindle website to transfer documents.

🆕 Amazon Lightsail now offers two larger managed database bundles with up to 8 vCPUs, 32 GB memory, and 960 GB SSD storage. The new bundles are offered in both standard and high‑availability plans and support managed MySQL and PostgreSQL engines. They target production workloads and data‑intensive applications—such as e‑commerce, content management systems, business intelligence, and SaaS—by delivering increased storage and processing capacity. These sizes are available in all AWS Regions where Lightsail is provided.

🔧 Microsoft is testing a new Group Policy, RemoveMicrosoftCopilotApp, that enables IT administrators to uninstall the AI-powered Copilot app on managed Windows devices. The policy began rolling out in the Dev and Beta Insider channels with Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26220.7535 (KB5072046) and applies to endpoints managed via Microsoft Intune or SCCM. It targets systems where both Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Copilot are installed, the app was not user-installed, and it hasn't been launched in the last 28 days. Admins can enable the setting at User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows AI -> Remove Microsoft Copilot App; users may still reinstall if they choose.

🔍 Amazon EMR Serverless now supports job run-level cost allocation, enabling organizations to attribute charges to individual job runs rather than only at the application level. You can filter and analyze costs by job run IDs and cost allocation tags in AWS Cost Explorer and Cost and Usage Reports to get finer-grained visibility. This makes it easier to track costs by domain, run per-job benchmarks, and target cost optimizations more precisely.

🔍 Hackensack Meridian Health used VPC Flow Logs and Flow Analyzer to obtain precise, end-to-end visibility of Cloud Interconnect traffic before a major Google Cloud network migration. They enabled VLAN-attachment flow logs, aggregated ingress/egress flows (IPs, ports, bytes, timestamps), and organized results into sankey diagrams mapping data center → region → VPC → application. This process revealed critical flows early and shortened incident detection to 3 minutes and resolution to 5 minutes, materially de-risking the cutover.

🏆 AWS was named a Leader in the 2025 ISG Provider Lens Quadrant report for Sovereign Cloud Infrastructure Services (EU). ISG evaluated 19 providers and rated AWS highest on portfolio attractiveness while also assessing strong competitive strength. The report highlights AWS’s sovereign-by-design architecture, data residency controls, granular access restrictions, encryption, and resilience. It emphasizes regional independence and resilience to meet European digital sovereignty and compliance needs.

🔐 Many security teams rely on click rates to judge phishing risk, but that metric is volatile and often fails to predict real-world harm. The article argues that true maturity is measured by what an attacker can do after gaining mailbox access, not by simulated click statistics. It urges a layered approach—prevention, detection, and especially containment—and highlights Material Security as an example of automated remediation that reduces blast radius without constant manual triage.

🔁 Infinity Playblocks introduces API Request Step and Webhook Trigger to enable seamless bi-directional integration with any external system. Security teams can now call outbound APIs from playbooks and accept inbound webhook events to initiate automations. This open automation approach connects SIEMs, ITSM platforms, cloud and network controls, and third-party services without bespoke connectors. The result is simpler orchestration, fewer manual handoffs, and faster incident response.

🔁 Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports cross-region read replicas in 16 additional AWS Regions. Customers can place read-only replicas closer to users to reduce latency and scale out read workloads while maintaining a centralized primary for writes. Because read replicas can be promoted to standalone databases, they can also be used as part of disaster recovery and regional failover strategies. Each primary database can have up to fifteen read replicas across same or different regions.

📝 Google is introducing an AI Inbox in Gmail that uses Gemini to surface prioritized briefings and summarize conversation threads with new AI Overviews. The feature appears above the traditional Inbox as a personalized briefing that highlights to-dos and VIP contacts inferred from email signals. AI Overviews are rolling out to all users at no cost, while AI Inbox is available to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in the United States. Google says users can opt out and reiterated it will not train its AI models on user emails.

🔐 Amazon MQ now supports certificate-based authentication for RabbitMQ brokers using mutual TLS (mTLS). The new capability lets brokers running RabbitMQ 4.2 and later use the auth_mechanism_ssl plugin, configured via the broker's configuration file. To enable it, create a new RabbitMQ 4.2 broker (M7g instance type) and update the configuration; the feature is available in all regions where Amazon MQ RabbitMQ 4 instances are offered.

🚀 AWS has made Amazon EC2 R8i and R8i-flex instances available in Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Hyderabad) and Europe (Paris). These instances use AWS-exclusive custom Intel Xeon 6 processors and deliver up to 15% better price-performance and 2.5x more memory bandwidth versus prior Intel-based generations. Compared with R7i, they offer roughly 20% higher performance with larger gains for specific workloads (up to 30% for PostgreSQL, 60% for NGINX, 40% for AI recommendation models). R8i-flex provides common memory-optimized sizes (large to 16xlarge) while R8i offers 13 sizes including two bare-metal SKUs and a new 96xlarge; the family is SAP-certified.

🗺️ Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is now available in the Asia Pacific (Jakarta) region, allowing teams to run document workloads closer to users. The fully managed JSON database provides automatic storage scaling up to 128TiB and supports millions of requests per second with fast scaling to 15 low‑latency read replicas and no application downtime. It integrates with AWS DMS, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, Lambda and AWS Backup, and clusters can be created via the AWS Management Console, CLI, or SDK to streamline migration and operations.

🤖 Amazon Quick now supports invoking specialized third-party agents (Box, Canva, PagerDuty) and expands its built-in actions library with integrations for GitHub, Notion, Canva, Box, Linear, Hugging Face, Monday.com, HubSpot, and Intercom. Users can run agentic tasks—pull incident insights, generate presentations, or query documents—directly from a single workspace. Quick also continues to support custom MCP and OpenAPI connectors for broader application connectivity. These features are available in all regions where Amazon Quick is offered.

🤖 Amazon Quick now supports invoking third‑party AI agents from Box, Canva, and PagerDuty, enabling chat and automation tasks—such as querying documents, generating presentations, and extracting incident insights—directly within the Quick workspace. Quick has also expanded its built‑in actions to include integrations with GitHub, Notion, Linear, Hugging Face, Monday.com, HubSpot, Intercom, and more, allowing users to create issues, summarize notes, and manage CRM workflows without switching apps. Customers can further connect thousands of additional applications using Model Context Protocol (MCP) and OpenAPI connectors. These features are available in all AWS Regions where Quick is offered.

🚀 Amazon has expanded availability of Amazon EC2 M8i instances to the Europe (Frankfurt) and Asia Pacific (Malaysia) regions. Powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors exclusive to AWS, the M8i offers up to 15% better price-performance and 2.5x higher memory bandwidth than prior Intel-based instances. AWS reports up to 20% better performance versus M7i, with workload-specific gains—up to 30% for PostgreSQL, 60% for NGINX, and 40% for deep learning recommendation models. The SAP-certified family includes 13 sizes, two bare-metal options and a new 96xlarge for very large workloads.

🔍 FINRA partnered with Google Cloud to adopt the DORA metrics and a data-first DevOps approach to shorten lead times and modernize its software lifecycle. A DORA workshop revealed lengthy User Acceptance Testing (UAT) cycles as a primary bottleneck, enabling a multi-million-dollar business case for a dedicated sandbox to accelerate testing and deployment. The initiative standardized DORA across teams and targets full adoption within the year.