All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔐 AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) now automates provisioning and distribution of exportable public and private certificates directly to Kubernetes workloads via AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK). The ACK controller handles the complete lifecycle — certificate request, validation, export, Kubernetes Secret creation, and automatic renewal updates. This removes the need to export certificates and rotate Secrets manually for pods, service meshes, and third-party ingress controllers. The feature supports Amazon EKS and hybrid or edge Kubernetes environments and is available in commercial, GovCloud (US), and China regions where ACM is offered.

🛡️ CrowdStrike announced general availability of Falcon AI Detection and Response (AIDR), an extension of the Falcon platform designed to protect the prompt and agent interaction layer where people, models and autonomous agents exchange instructions. AIDR offers unified visibility across endpoints, applications, MCP servers and API gateways, real-time detection of prompt injection and jailbreaks, automated data protection and attribute-based access controls. It supports browser extensions, application SDKs, gateway integrations and cloud log analysis for runtime enforcement and investigations.

🔒Extended Detection and Response (XDR) platforms combine elements of SIEM, EDR and SOAR to deliver unified visibility, real-time threat detection and automated response across endpoints, networks and cloud environments. The article outlines evaluation criteria — integration with existing investments, policy and rule management, and usability/training — and notes subscription pricing and staffing as primary cost considerations. It then lists prominent XDR offerings from vendors such as Bitdefender, CrowdStrike, Microsoft and others.

🔒 Microsoft has shifted to 'In Scope by Default', making any critical vulnerability with a demonstrable impact on its online services—whether in Microsoft-owned code, third-party components, or open-source—eligible for bounty awards. Announced at Black Hat Europe, the policy expands eligibility across Microsoft domains and cloud services and invites coordinated disclosure under agreed rules of engagement. The company says the change aims to incentivize research on the highest-risk areas, while established Rules of Engagement prohibit credential misuse, phishing, disruptive DoS testing, and other harmful methods.

🔒 This AWS Security Blog post explains how to implement HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) consistently across distributed AWS architectures using Amazon API Gateway, Application Load Balancers, and Amazon CloudFront. It presents concrete, service-specific configuration steps, example mappings and code snippets, and recommended curl commands to validate header delivery. The guidance highlights centralized header enforcement options to reduce fragmentation and align with the AWS Well-Architected Framework security principles. Practical advice covers testing, header override behaviors, and phased rollout using conservative max-age values before enabling preload in production.

🔒 AWS has expanded service availability for Dedicated Local Zones, enhancing options for compute, storage, backup, and recovery to address strict data residency and digital sovereignty requirements. The announcement adds newer EC2 generation 7 instance types with accelerated computing, EBS gp3 and io1 volumes, and additional Amazon S3 One Zone storage classes. It also introduces EBS Local Snapshots and local AMI support to keep backups and images within customer-specified perimeters, helping regulated and government customers meet compliance needs.

🔹Google's Data Cloud presents an AI-native approach to unify siloed, multimodal enterprise data and enable real-time insights. The platform integrates Gemini with BigQuery to automate pipeline building, vector embedding, and data quality, while Dataplex provides continuous cataloging and contextual metadata for agents. Enhancements to managed streaming, Pub/Sub UDFs, and Dataflow extend real-time processing, governance, and developer productivity.

🔊 The post announces general availability of Gemini Live API on Vertex AI, powered by the Gemini 2.5 Flash Native Audio model. It presents a unified, low-latency native audio architecture that replaces multi-stage STT/LLM/TTS pipelines and enables real-time multimodal reasoning over audio, text, and visual streams via a stateful WebSocket. Two quickstart templates (Vanilla JS and React) and three production demos illustrate common integration patterns, partner telephony/WebRTC support, and recommended backend proxying for secure credentials.

🔒 Google is offering public sector teams a no-cost 30-day test drive of Google Workspace, providing full access to its cloud-native productivity suite with embedded Gemini AI. The pilot includes guided setup, user onboarding, workflow testing, and an impact assessment report to quantify productivity and security benefits. Workspace with Gemini has FedRAMP High authorization and Google Public Sector cites CMMC Level 2 validation for internal systems handling CUI. Agencies can evaluate real workflows commitment-free and gather data to inform adoption decisions.

🔗 This post explains how to expose Looker’s semantic layer to Gemini Enterprise quickly by using the MCP Toolbox for Databases and the Agent Development Kit (ADK). It outlines three concise steps: deploy the MCP Toolbox (recommended to Cloud Run), build and deploy an ADK agent to Vertex AI Agent Engine, and register that agent with Gemini Enterprise. The result: trusted Looker models available inside Gemini for natural‑language business queries.

🔊 Gemini Live API, powered by the Gemini 2.5 Flash Native Audio model, is now generally available on Vertex AI. It enables low-latency, multimodal conversational agents that combine voice, vision, and text to deliver human-like, contextual interactions. The API supports natural turn-taking, acoustic cue analysis, and visual understanding, and is optimized for enterprise-scale, regional deployments and compliance. Early adopters including Shopify, United Wholesale Mortgage, and SightCall report improved efficiency and real-time assistance.

🔧 Kali Linux 2025.4 delivers three new tools and multiple desktop improvements in its final 2025 update. The release adds bpf-linker, evil-winrm-py, and hexstrike-ai, while upgrading GNOME to 49 (Wayland-only), KDE Plasma to 6.5, and enhancing Xfce theming. NetHunter device support and utilities were expanded, and the Kali Live image now ships via BitTorrent only. Administrators and pentesters should review the changelog and apply the provided upgrade commands.

🔒 Even well-defended environments can be undermined by 'shadow spreadsheets'—ad hoc Sheets or Excel files users share because official tools don't meet every need. These files proliferate, evade DLP and audit visibility, and create an unmanageable attack surface. Training or heavy-handed lockdowns often fail, while custom apps are costly and slow. The piece recommends Grist, a self-hostable, spreadsheet-like platform built on a relational back end with RBAC and audit logging to restore a single source of truth.

🚀 Amazon announces that EMR Managed Scaling is now available to EMR on EC2 customers in Asia Pacific (Malaysia, New Zealand, Taipei, Thailand), Canada West (Calgary), Mexico (Central), and US Gameday Northeast (Illinois). The feature automatically resizes EC2 instances to optimize performance and cost; you set minimum and maximum compute limits and EMR adjusts capacity using workload-driven algorithms. It supports Apache Spark, Apache Hive and YARN-based workloads on EMR on EC2 versions 6.14 and above and can use EC2 Spot Instances for additional savings.

🔒 AWS Shield Network Security Director is now available in preview with multi-account network security management, allowing delegated administrator accounts to run continuous analysis across an AWS Organization. It centralizes per-account network topology, security findings, and recommended remediations for missing or misconfigured network security services. The capability can summarize and report misconfigurations from within Amazon Q Developer and chat applications, and it is now available in five additional AWS regions.

🚀 AWS DataSync Enhanced mode now supports direct transfers between on‑premises NFS/SMB file servers and Amazon S3, removing file count limits and using parallel processing to boost throughput and scalability. The mode delivers detailed transfer metrics for improved monitoring and management and accelerates use cases such as generative AI dataset movement, data lake synchronization, and large‑scale migrations. This capability is available in all AWS Regions where DataSync is offered.

🚀 Amazon has expanded MSK Replicator availability to ten additional AWS Regions: Bahrain, UAE, Jakarta, Hong Kong, Osaka, Melbourne, Cape Town, Milan, Zurich, and Tel Aviv. MSK Replicator enables automatic asynchronous replication of streaming data and Kafka metadata (topic configurations, ACLs, consumer group offsets) across MSK clusters without custom code or manual infrastructure. The service scales automatically and can be configured via the Amazon MSK console or AWS CLI, bringing coverage to 35 Regions to support regionally resilient streaming and failover.

🔐 Check Point has extended CloudGuard Network Security to provide full auto-scaling support for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, enabling firewalls to grow and shrink automatically with workload demand. The integration leverages OCI Instance Pools to automate deployment and scaling of security gateways, while preserving centralized policy control. This update broadens CloudGuard’s native support across 20 public and private cloud vendors, delivering consistent security and operational agility as customers move workloads to OCI.

🚀 Amazon Web Services has made memory-optimized Amazon EC2 X2iedn instances available in the AWS Europe (Zurich) region. These instances use 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and the AWS Nitro System to deliver improved performance, better price performance, and lower cost per GiB of memory versus prior X1e instances. They are SAP-certified for a broad set of HANA and NetWeaver workloads.

🚀 AWS has announced the general availability of Elastic Beanstalk in five additional regions: Asia Pacific (New Zealand) (Melbourne), Asia Pacific (Malaysia), Asia Pacific (Hyderabad), Canada West (Calgary), and Europe (Zurich). The managed application platform automates deployment, capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and health monitoring. This expansion gives developers more regional choices for lower latency and data residency compliance. Customers should verify regional service availability and update deployment configurations as needed.