All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔁 Amazon Connect now supports storing and referencing nested JSON objects and lists directly within contact flows, enabling developers to save complete records and target specific elements such as an individual order. Flows can automatically iterate through arrays and maintain loop position, making it easy to present item-level details in sequence. Use cases include guiding callers through itineraries or recent transactions without repeated backend calls. These features are documented in the Amazon Connect Administrator Guide and available across all AWS regions where the service is offered.

🔔 OpenAI may grant a one-month complimentary subscription of ChatGPT Plus to certain users who request cancellation, a change first reported by BleepingComputer. The report describes a Flutter/Dart developer who switched to Claude and, when canceling, was presented with the free-month offer and an automatic temporary switch to $0/month. The trial is expected to end around Feb 17, 2026 and will revert to the paid price unless otherwise updated. The promotion is rolling out gradually across several regions; check the Manage button under Payment to confirm availability.

⚡ Adapt Browser is a lightweight, task-focused browser designed to reduce CPU and memory overhead, simplify the interface, and centralize web workflows for improved productivity. By minimizing background services and avoiding feature bloat, it delivers faster page loads and more responsive tab and window management. Built as a non‑Chromium browser and AppEsteem-certified, Adapt emphasizes resource control and transparency without complex setup, producing a clearer workspace and fewer distractions during extended work sessions.

📢Google Cloud’s Data Cloud updates through mid‑2025 introduce new self‑service Looker features, expanded Model Context Protocol (MCP) support, and tighter AI-to-data integrations. Highlights include AlloyDB AI time‑series forecasting via AI.FORECAST, GA of Conversational Analytics powered by Gemini, and the MCP Toolbox and ADK to securely connect agents to BigQuery, Spanner, Cloud SQL, and Looker. Dataplex Universal Catalog now previews curated data products for governed, deployable datasets and AI use.

🔒 Our Cloud-Delivered Security Services unify Advanced Threat Prevention, Advanced WildFire, Advanced DNS Security and Advanced URL Filtering into a single AI-powered fabric. Precision AI correlates billions of signals across networks, users and applications to shift organizations from reactive detection to proactive, patient-zero prevention. When fully enabled and integrated through a single management plane, CDSS reduces operational complexity, delivers consistent policy enforcement and blocks evolving threats in real time to protect business continuity.

🔒 Since the 2017 breach, Equifax has pursued a comprehensive security transformation, investing nearly $3 billion to rebuild technology and migrate to Google Cloud under NIST-aligned frameworks. The company reports that security is now embedded across processes and incentivized through employee bonuses, with regional CISOs adapting programs to EU rules like DORA and NIS2. Equifax says it neutralizes millions of threats daily and uses a hybrid approach to AI-driven attacks, combining multiple layers of controls rather than relying on a single technology.

🛡️ AWS announced that AWS WAF is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region. AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect web applications from common exploits and bots by letting you block, allow, or return custom responses based on conditions such as source IP, query strings, and other request attributes. This regional expansion supports lower latency and regional data handling for New Zealand customers.

📥 AWS today introduces a simplified workflow to import historical CloudTrail Lake event data directly into Amazon CloudWatch. You specify the CloudTrail Lake event data store (EDS) and a date range to initiate imports; the capability is supported via the AWS console, CLI, and SDK. The change lets teams consolidate operational, security, and compliance telemetry in one place. There’s no separate import charge, but standard CloudWatch custom logs pricing applies.

🔒 Organizations face an escalating threat landscape and an expanding cyber skills gap that compliance-focused training cannot close. Platforms like Cybrary, in partnership with Check Point Infinity Global Services, emphasize role-based, hands-on learning—combining industry certifications, simulated labs, and tailored learning paths to better prepare security teams for incident response, SOC operations, and threat hunting. This practical approach strengthens resilience by enabling measurable skills and reducing real-world vulnerabilities.

📊 Amazon Connect dashboards now support filtering metrics by custom business dimensions such as business divisions, product lines, and customer segments. Using predefined attributes, administrators can create business dimensions to tailor dashboard views and compare key metrics across segments. This enables focused analysis of handle times, service levels, and other KPIs to identify training or staffing needs. Dashboards are available in all AWS commercial and GovCloud regions where Amazon Connect is offered.

🔒 Check Point announced multiple 2025 recognitions from leading analyst firms and independent research labs, underscoring its focus on securing AI-driven environments and distributed networks. The company emphasized a prevention-first philosophy that unifies security management and strengthens Zero Trust frameworks. These honors reflect validation of its strategy to enable safe enterprise AI adoption amid growing cyber threats.

🔐 Amazon OpenSearch UI now supports AWS KMS customer managed keys (CMKs) and increases metadata size limits. You can create new OpenSearch UI applications with metadata encrypted using your own CMKs, helping meet regulatory and compliance requirements. The larger metadata limit enables richer, more complex queries, extensive visualizations, and large-scale dashboards. Both features are available in all regions that OpenSearch UI supports.

⚙️ Falcon for IT provides turnkey automations—prebuilt content packs that let operators query endpoints, run remediation, and enforce baseline configurations without custom scripts. Packs execute through the existing Falcon sensor and cover application resilience, file indexing, Linux device control, and operational tasks with CrowdStrike and partner-contributed content. Built-in dashboards surface pack activity and remediation outcomes to accelerate response and reduce operational overhead.

📣 Amazon Connect now automates agent performance evaluations in Portuguese, French, Italian, German, and Spanish using generative AI. Managers can define custom evaluation criteria in natural language and receive AI-generated assessments with justifications in their preferred language. The feature also supports cross-language evaluation, producing English assessments from non-English conversations, and is available in eight AWS regions.

✉️ Google is rolling out a new option that lets users change their @gmail.com address or add a new @gmail.com alias from Account Settings. The capability appears to be in a limited rollout and was spotted via a support document currently visible in Hindi, suggesting regional testing. When applied, the original address will continue to receive mail and the account may effectively retain multiple active @gmail.com addresses. Google has not provided a public timeline for wider availability.

🔒 Microsoft will let security administrators block external users from sending messages, placing calls, or inviting employees to meetings in Teams, managed directly through the Tenant Allow/Block List in the Microsoft Defender portal. The capability integrates with Defender for Office 365 and the Defender XDR web portal and applies across all Teams clients without altering existing domain blocks or federation settings. Organizations must enable two disabled Teams admin center settings to grant security teams permission to manage blocked domains and users.

🔒 Microsoft is rolling out hardware-accelerated BitLocker in Windows 11, offloading bulk cryptographic operations to SoC components with HSMs and TEEs to reduce CPU usage and improve I/O performance. The feature defaults to XTS-AES-256 on supported NVMe systems and initially appears on Intel Core Ultra Series 3 platforms. It’s available in Windows 11 24H2 (with September updates) and 25H2; verify mode with manage-bde -status.

📍 Oracle Database@AWS is now generally available in US‑East‑2 (Ohio), EU‑Central‑1 (Frankfurt), and AP‑Northeast‑1 (Tokyo). With this expansion, customers can run OCI Exadata Database Service, OCI Autonomous Database on Dedicated Infrastructure, and OCI Autonomous Recovery Service within AWS data centers across five regions. The launch simplifies migration of on‑premises Exadata workloads and helps meet in‑region data residency requirements. To consume the services, customers request a private offer from Oracle via the AWS Marketplace and provision resources through the AWS Management Console.

🚀 Amazon Bedrock now supports NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B, NVIDIA's efficient hybrid Mixture-of-Experts language model with a 256k token context window and native tool-calling support. The model delivers higher throughput for agentic, coding, and complex reasoning workloads while preserving the depth of larger models through advanced reinforcement learning and multi-environment post-training. Powered by Project Mantle, Bedrock provides serverless distributed inference, QoS controls, automated capacity management and OpenAI API compatibility across multiple AWS Regions.

🔔 Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) is now available in the Asia Pacific (New Zealand) region. Customers can create provisioned clusters with either Standard or new Express brokers, with Express delivering significantly higher throughput, faster scaling, and quicker recovery. Create clusters via the Amazon MSK console or the AWS CLI and refer to the Amazon MSK Developer Guide to get started.