All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔔 This Google Cloud roundup summarizes recent product milestones, GA launches, previews, and integrations across the data analytics, BI, and database portfolio. It highlights updates to BigQuery, Firestore, Cloud SQL, AlloyDB, and adjacent services aimed at easing ingestion, migration, and AI-driven operations. Notable items include MongoDB-compatible Firestore GA, PSC networking improvements for Database Migration Service, and a redesigned BigQuery data ingestion experience. The post also emphasizes resilience and DR enhancements such as immutable backups and Near Zero Downtime maintenance.

🔒 David Stone and Marina Kaganovich from Google Cloud’s Office of the CISO warn that cyber-enabled fraud (CEF) is scaling rapidly and presents severe financial and reputational risk. The post cites FBI data — $13.7 billion in losses in 2024 — and highlights common tactics such as phishing, ransomware, account takeover, and business email compromise. It urges CISOs and boards to shift from siloed defenses to a proactive, enterprise-wide posture using frameworks like FS-ISAC’s Cyber Fraud Prevention Framework and Google Cloud detection and protection capabilities.

🔊 Amazon Connect now provides generative text-to-speech voices—20 generative-enhanced voices across English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian. Use them for welcome messages, policy announcements, or dynamic conversational AI, configurable in the drag-and-drop flow designer via the “Set Voice” block or through public APIs. Available in US East (N. Virginia), Europe (Frankfurt), and US West (Oregon). Pricing options include unlimited AI or individual per-use pricing.

🔐 Amazon announced that OpenSearch Serverless now supports attribute-based authorization (ABAC) for Data Plane APIs, enabling identity policies in AWS IAM to control data read and write operations on collections. The release also introduces resource control policy (RCP), a new AWS Organizations–managed policy type that enforces organization-wide preventative controls centrally. Customers should check regional availability and consult the documentation for implementation guidance.

🚀 AWS has made the new M8i and M8i-flex EC2 instances generally available, powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors exclusive to AWS. The instances offer up to 15% better price-performance and 2.5x the memory bandwidth versus previous Intel-based generations, and AWS reports up to 20% higher performance compared with M7i and M7i-flex with larger gains for specific workloads. Initial availability includes US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Spain).

🤖 Cloudflare offers a one-click path to conversational search by combining Microsoft’s NLWeb open standard with Cloudflare’s managed retrieval engine, AutoRAG. The integration crawls and indexes site content into R2 and a managed vector store, serves embeddings and inference via Workers AI, and exposes both a user-facing /ask endpoint and an agent-focused /mcp endpoint. Publishers get continuous re-indexing, controlled agent access, and observability through an AI Gateway, removing much of the infrastructure burden for conversational experiences.

🛡️Cloudflare has rebranded its AI Audit beta as AI Crawl Control and moved the tool to general availability, giving publishers more granular ways to manage AI crawlers. Paid customers can now block specific bots and return customizable HTTP 402 Payment Required responses containing contact or licensing instructions. The feature aims to replace the binary allow-or-block choice with a channel for negotiation and potential monetization, while pay-per-crawl remains in beta.

🔐 Cloudflare introduces signed agents, a new classification that cryptographically verifies agent-originated traffic using Web Bot Auth HTTP message signatures. Signed agents represent end-user-directed automation rather than operator-owned crawlers, enabling sites to allow or block them with finer granularity. The update adds signed agents to the public Radar directory and to the bots and agents dashboard for visibility and submissions.

🔒 Fortinet SecOps unifies telemetry across network, endpoints, cloud, and email into a single data lake, reducing blind spots and simplifying investigation. Powered by FortiGuard AI and integrated tools like FortiSIEM, FortiEDR, FortiNDR, and FortiSOAR, it couples behavior-based detection with automated playbook-driven response. The platform emphasizes analyst-centric dashboards, Security Fabric enforcement, and continuous exposure management to lower false positives and accelerate containment.

☁️ Google Public Sector has been awarded a $48 million DLA Enterprise Platform contract to migrate the Defense Logistics Agency to a DoD‑accredited commercial cloud. The multi‑phased program will move key infrastructure and data to a modern, AI‑ready Google Cloud foundation and enable BigQuery, Looker, and Vertex AI analytics. Emphasizing secure‑by‑design infrastructure and Mandiant threat intelligence, the effort aims to reduce costs, improve resiliency, and accelerate AI‑driven logistics and transportation management.

🛠️ AWS now supports creating Amazon S3 Tables and namespaces with AWS CloudFormation and the AWS CDK, extending existing support for table buckets. This enables developers and teams to provision, update, and manage S3 Tables resources using infrastructure-as-code workflows, improving repeatability and version control across multiple AWS accounts. The CloudFormation and CDK integrations are available in all Regions where S3 Tables are offered, and AWS points users to the CloudFormation, CDK, and S3 Tables documentation to get started.

🛡️ Amazon Web Services announced expanded support for VPC Traffic Mirroring, enabling the feature on a broader set of EC2 instance types. With this update, Traffic Mirroring can now be enabled on all Nitro v4 instances and is available across all regions. The capability replicates instance network traffic to security and monitoring appliances for use cases such as content inspection, threat monitoring, and troubleshooting; consult the AWS documentation for the complete supported instance lists and Nitro system mappings.

🛡️ Many organizations rely on SaaS project platforms such as Trello and Asana for daily operations, but native protections and short retention windows often leave critical data exposed. The piece highlights human error, misconfiguration, and targeted cyberattacks as leading causes of loss. It recommends adding a third‑party backup layer and presents FluentPro Backup as a solution offering continuous automated backups, granular restores, one‑click project recovery, and Azure‑backed security to ensure recoverability and auditability.

🔐 EuroDaT describes how its safeAML platform, built on Google Cloud and Google Kubernetes Engine, enables controlled, pseudonymous exchange of sensitive transaction data between banks. Acting as a neutral data trustee, EuroDaT never accesses personal content while automating secure, auditable workflows that replace error-prone phone calls. Pilots with German banks show faster, more accurate suspicion assessments and lower false positives.

🔒 EuroDaT, a state-owned data trustee, built safeAML with major German banks to enable controlled, pseudonymous transaction matching while preserving GDPR compliance. The cloud-native service runs on Google Cloud and Google Kubernetes Engine, using infrastructure-as-code, isolated VPCs and auditable processing so EuroDaT never accesses personal-data content. By letting banks request targeted supplementary information, safeAML accelerates suspicious-activity checks, reduces false positives and lays groundwork for wider use in ESG and health data sharing.

🚀 Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports i8g instances, the latest generation of storage-optimized instances powered by AWS Graviton4 processors. i8g delivers up to 60% better compute and uses third-generation Nitro NVMe SSDs for up to 65% better storage performance per TB, lower latency, and reduced latency variability. Supported for OpenSearch and Elasticsearch 7.9/7.10 across multiple regions.

🔧 AWS now offers two new capabilities for EC2 Mac Dedicated Hosts: Host Recovery and Reboot-based Host Maintenance. Host Recovery detects potential hardware issues and transparently migrates Mac instances to replacement hosts to minimize disruption. Reboot-based Host Maintenance automates instance stop and restart on replacement hosts during scheduled maintenance, eliminating manual intervention. These features support all EC2 Mac instance families on both Intel and Apple silicon and are available in regions that support EC2 Mac instances.

📣 Amazon has made CloudWatch RUM generally available in AWS GovCloud (US-East) and AWS GovCloud (US-West). The service collects client-side performance and error telemetry in real time and provides curated dashboards showing page load steps, core web vitals, JavaScript and HTTP errors across geolocations, browsers, and devices. It integrates with CloudWatch Application Signals to correlate front-end telemetry with backend metrics, and usage is billed per collected RUM event.

🚀 Amazon EC2 C8gn instances, powered by AWS Graviton4 processors, are now available in US West (N. California). These instances deliver up to 30% better compute performance than Graviton3-based C7gn, include 6th-generation AWS Nitro Cards, and offer up to 600 Gbps of network bandwidth. C8gn scales to 48xlarge (up to 384 GiB memory) with up to 60 Gbps to EBS, and selected large/metal sizes support EFA for lower-latency clusters. They are optimized for network-intensive workloads, high-throughput analytics, network virtual appliances, and CPU-based AI/ML inference.

🔁 Amazon EKS now supports on-demand refresh of cluster insights, enabling operators to retrieve the latest detection results immediately after making changes. The capability complements existing periodic checks that identify upgrade warnings and configuration recommendations. By allowing immediate verification, teams can accelerate upgrade testing, confirm that remediations took effect, and shorten the feedback loop for cluster configuration changes.