All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🆕 Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 18.0 is now available in the RDS Database Preview Environment, enabling evaluation of new PostgreSQL capabilities within a fully managed sandbox. PostgreSQL 18.0 introduces multicolumn B-tree skip scan, improved WHERE handling for OR/IN conditions, parallel GIN builds, updated join behavior, and UUIDv7 support. The preview preserves instances for up to 60 days, restricts snapshots to the preview environment, and supports database import/export via dump/load; pricing follows the US East (Ohio) Region.

🔍 AWS X-Ray now supports adaptive sampling to automatically adjust trace sampling within user-defined limits. This feature offers two modes—Sampling Boost to temporarily raise sampling when anomalies are detected and Anomaly Span Capture to retain spans tied to anomalies even if the full trace isn't sampled. Adaptive sampling aims to reduce MTTR by capturing critical traces during incidents while keeping observability costs low. It is available in all commercial regions where X‑Ray is offered.

🔍 You can now preview Amazon S3 Tables directly in the S3 console without writing SQL. The console preview displays table schema, column types, and sample rows so you can quickly inspect structure and key data points without additional setup. Previews are available in all AWS Regions where S3 Tables are offered. You are charged only for the S3 requests used to read the sampled rows; consult S3 pricing and the S3 User Guide for details.

🔒 CrowdStrike has been named an innovation and growth leader in the 2025 Frost Radar: Cloud Workload Protection Platforms, ranking highest on the Innovation Index. Falcon Cloud Security provides unified, AI-native protection across pre-runtime and runtime, combining agent-based and agentless coverage, shift-left CI/CD policy enforcement, continuous posture management, and runtime defenses. Integration with the Falcon platform’s XDR and MDR and a single sensor for hybrid environments enables faster cross-domain detection and response.

🔒 Ineffective recovery processes and increasingly sophisticated ransomware are driving adoption of Cyber Recovery approaches that isolate and validate backups before restoring systems. Modern platforms combine immutable snapshots, sandboxed restores, and automated forensics with AI/ML-based detection to identify safe restore points and reduce downtime. Vendors highlighted include Acronis, Cohesity, Commvault, Dell, Druva, Rubrik, Veeam, Zerto.

🔐 AWS Lambda now supports code signing in AWS GovCloud (US-West and US-East) through the managed AWS Signer service. Lambda validates signatures at deployment to ensure code has not been altered and that it originates from trusted signers. Administrators can create Signing Profiles, bind allowed profiles to functions, and configure whether failed signature checks produce warnings or reject deployments. Access and permissions are controlled via IAM, and there is no additional charge to use this capability.

🔧 Kali Linux 2025.3 delivers ten new tools and expanded Wi-Fi and NetHunter capabilities. Notable additions include Caido (client and server), Detect It Easy, Gemini CLI, krbrelayx, ligolo-mp, and vwifi-dkms for dummy Wi‑Fi networks. Nexmon support is restored for Broadcom/Cypress chips and Raspberry Pi devices, while NetHunter gains Samsung S10 support and CARsenal updates. Users can upgrade via the Kali rolling repository or download the new ISOs.

🚀 Google Cloud has extended core Autopilot capabilities to qualified Standard GKE clusters, enabling access to the new container-optimized compute platform via built-in compute classes. Available initially to clusters in the Rapid release channel running 1.33.1-gke.1107000 or later, these features include the autopilot and autopilot-spot compute classes and a provisioning mode that supports gradual adoption. Benefits include rapid horizontal and vertical scaling, pay-for-request billing, efficient bin-packing, and support for GPUs and TPUs for AI workloads.

🔁 Amazon Web Services has made the Application Recovery Controller Region switch feature available in the Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region. Region switch lets teams orchestrate and execute cross-account and cross-Region recovery steps while providing real-time dashboards and consolidated data collection to support regulator and compliance reporting. The feature supports failover/failback for active/passive designs and shift-away/return for active/active architectures, and automatically replicates plans to all Regions where the application runs.

🔧This wrap-up of the Agent Factory series lays out a repeatable blueprint for designing and deploying enterprise-grade AI agents and introduces the agentic web stack. It catalogs eight essential components—communication protocols, discovery, identity and trust, tool invocation, orchestration, telemetry, memory, and governance—and positions Azure AI Foundry as an implementation. The post stresses open standards such as MCP and A2A, emphasizes interoperability across organizations, and highlights observability and governance as core operational requirements.

🔧 Google released open-source Gemini CLI extensions that integrate Gemini with Google Data Cloud services, enabling terminal-based access to BigQuery, Cloud SQL, and AlloyDB. Developers install the CLI (recommended v0.6.0), add extensions, and configure IAM and environment variables to connect to projects. Extensions support provisioning databases and users, natural-language querying, AI forecasting, and conversational analytics, though some require enabling additional APIs.

🧭 Google outlines an AI-native stack to transform data scientists into agentic architects, unifying development, real-time data access, and production-grade agent deployment. Enhancements to Colab Enterprise notebooks add native SQL cells, editable visualizations, and an interactive Data Science Agent that can orchestrate BigQuery ML, DataFrames, and Spark workflows. The Lightning Engine is now generally available to accelerate Spark, while previews for stateful BigQuery continuous queries and autonomous embedding generation bring real-time streaming and vector search into analytics. A 'Build-Deploy-Connect' toolkit, including the Agent Development Kit, MCP Toolbox, and Gemini CLI extensions, helps move notebook prototypes into secure, scalable agent fleets.

🔐 Fortinet’s Veterans Program, in partnership with VetSec, provides veterans and spouses free access to training, hands-on labs, and certification vouchers to accelerate entry into cybersecurity. Participants progress from foundational courses through associate-level credentials, including structured offerings such as the Networking Fundamentals Bootcamp. Graduates like Jeramiah Poff and Derek Zobler reported direct job placements—roles ranging from security architect to cyberthreat hunter—demonstrating measurable workforce impact.

🔐 Cloudflare's Automatic SSL/TLS now upgrades origin-facing encryption by default, having strengthened over 6 million domains without operator intervention. The system scans origins, verifies content and certificates, then gradually ramps stronger SSL/TLS modes from 1% to 100% of traffic, aborting safely on failures. This prepares sites for the post-quantum era by favoring hybrid key agreements (X25519 + ML-KEM) and will soon automate post-quantum handshakes and ad-hoc rescans.

🔒 Cloudflare has simplified access to its CSAM Scanning Tool by removing the prior requirement for National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) credentials. The tool relies on fuzzy hashing to create perceptual fingerprints that detect altered images with high confidence. Since the change in February, monthly adoption has increased sixteenfold. Detected matches result in blocked URLs and owner notifications so site operators can remediate.

🚀 Indiana Department of Transportation built a week-long pilot on Google Cloud to meet a 30-day executive order, using a Retrieval-Augmented Generation workflow that combined rapid ETL, Vertex AI Search indexing, and Gemini. The system scraped and parsed decades of internal policies and manuals, produced draft reports across nine divisions with 98% fidelity, and saved an estimated 360 hours of manual effort, enabling INDOT to submit on time.

🌐Cloudflare is prototyping a SaaS-to-SaaS proxy that consolidates SaaS connections through a single front door to improve monitoring, detection, and response. Two deployment models are proposed: a customer-controlled vanity hostname proxy that returns visibility to data owners, and a vendor-side reverse proxy that strengthens platform security. Both approaches use key splitting to avoid persisting full bearer tokens and enable instant revocation. Cloudflare is seeking feedback and offering early access.

🛡️ Cloudflare introduced the Content Signals Policy, an extension to robots.txt that lets site operators express how crawlers may use content after it has been accessed. The policy defines three machine-readable signals — search, ai-input, and ai-train — each set to yes/no or left unset. Cloudflare will add a default signal set (search=yes, ai-train=no) to managed robots.txt for ~3.8M domains, serve commented guidance for free zones, and publish the spec under CC0. Cloudflare emphasizes signals are preferences, not technical enforcement, and recommends pairing them with WAF and Bot Management.

🔐 Cloudflare's WARP client now supports post-quantum key agreement across both consumer (1.1.1.1) and enterprise (Cloudflare One Agent) offerings, tunneling traffic over MASQUE with hybrid post-quantum/classical ciphersuites. The upgrade provides immediate protection against harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks by wrapping user traffic in post-quantum MASQUE tunnels even when individual connections inside the tunnel are not yet PQ-protected. Cloudflare staged the rollout with temporary downgrades, phased population enablement, and an MDM override to balance robustness and downgrade-resistance while meeting FIPS/FedRAMP constraints.

🔐 Cisco Talos Incident Response (Talos IR) provides rapid, 24/7 crisis support and proactive services to contain, investigate, and remediate cybersecurity incidents. Talos combines deep threat intelligence, digital forensics, and a vendor-agnostic approach to work with existing tools and environments. Engagements follow a structured IR lifecycle—Preparation, Identification, Containment, Eradication, Recovery, and Lessons learned—to minimize disruption and build long-term resilience.