All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔒 In this Deputy CISO blog, Damon Becknel, Microsoft’s VP and Deputy CISO for Regulated Industries, outlines four immediate priorities organizations should act on now. He emphasizes reinforcing essential cyber hygiene—accurate asset inventories, network segmentation, timely patching, MFA, EDR, and proxying email and web traffic—as the most effective means to reduce common intrusions. Becknel also urges adoption of modern standards like phishing-resistant MFA, secure DNS and DMARC, deployment of fingerprinting to track bad actors, and active cross-industry collaboration to share threat signals and raise the cost of attack.

🚀 The NVIDIA Run:ai Model Streamer now supports native Google Cloud Storage access, accelerating model load and inference startup for vLLM workloads on GKE. By streaming tensors directly from Cloud Storage into GPU memory and using distributed, NVLink-aware transfers, the streamer dramatically reduces cold-start latency and idle GPU time. Enabling it in vLLM is a single-flag change and it can leverage GKE Workload Identity for secure, keyless access.

🚀 Replit and Google Cloud have expanded a strategic, multi‑year partnership to bring vibe coding capabilities to enterprise developers and teams. Replit will continue to run on Google Cloud infrastructure—leveraging Cloud Run, Google Kubernetes Engine, BigQuery, and Vertex AI—and now supports Google models including Gemini 3, 2.5 Flash Lite, 2.5 Flash, and Imagen 4 to power coding and multimodal workflows. The agreement also includes joint go‑to‑market and co‑sell initiatives to accelerate adoption across enterprise customers.

🔍 Google Cloud has introduced data products in Dataplex Universal Catalog (preview), packaging curated data assets, documentation, and governance controls into purpose-built units aligned to business use cases. These data products let producers declare quality, freshness, ownership, and contractual guarantees while grouping assets to simplify access and reduce operational toil. Consumers can discover, request access, and rely on documented lineage and context to accelerate analytics. Google also positions data products as foundational inputs to more reliable AI and agent-driven workflows.

🔒 Check Point's new Quantum Firewall Software release, R82.10, extends a prevention-first security model across CloudGuard Network and Quantum Force Firewalls. The update unifies management, strengthens Zero Trust controls for hybrid mesh environments, and adds enforcement and telemetry designed to protect MCP servers, AI workloads, cloud assets and on-prem systems. It simplifies policy consistency and supports responsible AI adoption through data-aware controls and centralized governance.

🔒 Palo Alto Networks explains why the GSA OneGov agreement matters for federal AI adoption and cybersecurity. Author Eric Trexler cites Unit 42 research showing new risks—particularly AI Agent Smuggling via indirect prompt injection and agent session smuggling—and argues AI must be defended as an attack surface. The post highlights platform protections including Prisma AIRS, FedRAMP High CNAPP, and Prisma SASE to secure AI workloads, edge users, and data. It positions OneGov as a procurement shortcut for agencies to deploy AI securely and notes promotional offers through 31 January 2028.

🤖 Google Public Sector ran a #100DaysOfAgents campaign and an interactive Mission District at its October 29, 2025 Public Sector Summit where attendees built 300+ AI agent prototypes using self-serve builder stations. The initiative demonstrates how AI agents can accelerate mission outcomes by automating complex tasks, breaking down data silos, and improving access to services. Prototype examples ranged from a Grid Optimization Analyst to a Water System Transition Planner and an NIH Access Assistant; agents in the library are illustrative, not production-ready. Google invites agencies to partner with experts, prototype with Gemini for Government, and continue development at Google Cloud Next.

⚠️ Microsoft is investigating a known issue that prevents customers from downloading Microsoft 365 desktop apps from the Microsoft 365 homepage, with failures reported since November 2. The company says a recent service update introduced a code defect affecting the license check process, and it has tagged the situation as an incident. A fix has been developed and is being validated in Microsoft's internal environment, and the company promised an update on deployment timing by 6:30 PM UTC. Microsoft is also addressing a separate issue causing some users to be unable to open Excel attachments in the new Outlook client due to filename encoding errors.

🔬 Google Cloud has made PubMed content available as a BigQuery public dataset with integrated vector search via Vertex AI, enabling semantic search across more than 35 million biomedical articles. Both BigQuery and Vertex AI Vector Search are FedRAMP High authorized, allowing organizations to run embedding models and VECTOR_SEARCH queries inside BigQuery. Early adopters like The Princess Máxima Center report literature reviews reduced from hours to minutes, and example SQL plus a demo repo are provided to help teams get started.

🛡️ CISA launched the Industry Engagement Platform (IEP) to create a structured, two-way channel between the agency and companies, researchers, and academia to present emerging cybersecurity and infrastructure technologies. The platform lets organizations build customizable technology profiles and upload capability overviews to connect with the right CISA subject-matter experts. Participation does not confer preferential contract consideration, but informs CISA market research and mission needs.

🚀 Amazon Bedrock now exposes an OpenAI-compatible Responses API on new service endpoints, enabling asynchronous inference for long-running workloads, streaming and non-streaming modes, and automatic stateful conversation reconstruction so developers no longer must resend full histories. The endpoints provide Chat Completions with reasoning-effort support for models served by Mantle, Amazon’s distributed inference engine. Integration requires only a base URL change for OpenAI SDK–compatible code, and support starts today for OpenAI’s GPT OSS 20B and 120B models, with additional models coming soon.

🚀 Amazon Web Services today previewed new Amazon EC2 M9g instances powered by AWS Graviton5 processors. AWS says M9g delivers up to 25% better compute performance and increased networking and EBS bandwidth versus Graviton4-based M8g, with up to 30–35% faster performance for databases, web applications, and machine learning. Built on the AWS Nitro System, M9g targets application servers, microservices, gaming servers, midsize data stores, and caching fleets, and is available in preview through a request process.

🔍 This post previews Google's new design recommendation for leveraging GKE's flat network, explaining how it differs from island-mode networking and how teams can adapt existing architectures. It highlights recommended patterns and a reference design that emulates island-mode behavior within the flat model. The guidance focuses on IP address management, scalability, and integration points to ease migration for critical workloads such as generative AI.

🧭 Google announces generally available automated metadata generation in the Google Data Cloud, using Dataplex Universal Catalog and Gemini to convert profiling and schema context into human-readable table and column descriptions. The capability integrates with BigQuery, stores generated descriptions for search and governance, and is accessible via an API. It aims to reduce "metadata debt," accelerate time-to-insight, and provide reliable grounding for AI agents, while still encouraging human review for key business definitions.

🔒 Google is expanding its Android in-call scam protection to cover several U.S. financial apps, including Cash App and the JPMorgan Chase mobile banking app. The feature, introduced with Android 16, warns users when they launch a financial app while sharing their screen during a call with an unknown number, presenting a persistent 30-second alert that only allows ending the call. The protection runs on Android 11 and later and remains in a testing phase.

🔒 Microsoft is expanding Azure with on‑premises, edge, and hybrid options to deliver AI, resilience, and operational sovereignty. Azure Local provides integrated compute, storage, and networking on customer premises with GA features like Microsoft 365 Local and NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, plus previews for disconnected operations and multi‑rack scale. Coupled with Azure IoT, Microsoft Fabric, and Azure Arc management enhancements, the updates enable near‑real‑time analytics, secure device identity, and a unified control plane for distributed estates. The goal is to accelerate AI and analytics while preserving data residency, continuity, and compliance for regulated or mission‑critical environments.

🚀 CME Group partnered with Google Cloud to migrate its critical trading databases to Cloud SQL, aiming to sustain ultra-low-latency operations and reduce operational overhead. The managed service provides built-in observability and AI-assisted insights that surface anomalies and suggest query optimizations, enabling teams to identify root causes in minutes. As a result, administrators focus on strategic improvements while developers iterate faster and collaborate across environments.

🔒 Android is expanding its pilot for in-call scam protection that detects when users launch participating financial apps while screen sharing during calls from unsaved numbers. The feature warns users, offers a one-tap end-call and stop-sharing option, and enforces a 30-second pause to disrupt social engineering. After UK success and pilots in Brazil and India, Google is rolling pilots with US fintechs including Cash App and banks like JPMorganChase.

🔒 The UK's National Cyber Security Agency (NCSC) reports its Share and Defend service has blocked almost one billion attempts to access malicious websites in under a year. Launched in May 2024, the service aggregates threat intelligence and indicators of compromise (IOCs) from partners and data sources, then shares them with ISPs such as BT, Vodafone, and TalkTalk for DNS filtering. When users try to follow phishing links, fraudulent texts or scam adverts, connections to known malicious domains are stopped automatically. The initiative supports the government's Stop! Think Fraud campaign and aims to reduce online fraud for consumers and businesses.

🔒Fortinet positions secure SD-WAN as the essential foundation for effective SASE, arguing that unified networking and security deliver consistent policy enforcement and optimized connectivity across hybrid and cloud environments. Integrated capabilities such as local internet breakout, built-in ZTNA, and application-aware routing reduce latency and attack surface while improving user experience. AI-enhanced operations and centralized management simplify troubleshooting and accelerate deployments.