All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🚀 At Microsoft Ignite 2025, Microsoft unveiled a suite of Azure infrastructure and AI operational innovations built for scale, reliability, and security. Azure Copilot introduces an agentic operations model with six specialized agents—migration, deployment, optimization, observability, resiliency, and troubleshooting—designed to automate routine cloud management while enforcing RBAC and policy. The release also highlights new AI datacenter architecture (Fairwater), deployment of NVIDIA GB300 GPUs at scale, and platform improvements like Azure Boost and AKS Automatic to accelerate performance and reduce operational overhead.

🚀 At Microsoft Ignite 2025, Azure introduced a coordinated set of agentic and data-first capabilities to accelerate enterprise AI adoption. Announcements include Microsoft Agent Factory (available), previews of Fabric IQ and Foundry IQ, expanded Foundry model choices (Anthropic, Cohere), and new database offerings like Azure HorizonDB and Azure DocumentDB. The updates emphasize unified data, model choice, and integrated security to simplify building, running, and governing AI agents at scale.

🔧 Microsoft today expanded Foundry, its platform for building production AI apps and agents, with new models, developer tools, and governance controls. Key updates include broader model access (Anthropic, Cohere, NVIDIA), a generally available model router, and public previews for Foundry IQ, Agent Service features (hosted agents, memory, multi-agent workflows), and the Foundry Control Plane. Foundry Tools and Foundry Local bring real-time connectors and edge inference, while Managed Instance on Azure App Service eases .NET cloud migrations.

🛡️ At Microsoft Ignite 2025, Microsoft set out an ambient, autonomous security approach for the emerging agentic era and announced a suite of tools to observe, secure, and govern AI agents and apps. The centerpiece is Microsoft Agent 365, a control plane providing an Entra-based registry, access controls, visualization, and integrations with Defender, Entra, and Purview to detect prompt-injection, prevent leakage, and enable auditing. Microsoft also expanded platform protections, enhanced Copilot data controls in Purview, and positioned Microsoft Sentinel and Security Copilot as agentic security pillars for detection and response.

🛡️ Microsoft is including Security Copilot agents in Microsoft 365 E5, embedding AI-driven assistants across Defender, Entra, Intune, and Purview to accelerate investigations and automate routine tasks. The rollout begins today for existing Security Copilot customers on E5 and will expand to all E5 tenants in the coming months with a 30-day notification. The announcement adds 12 Microsoft-built preview agents, 30+ partner agents, and support for customer-built agents to tailor workflows.

🔒 Palo Alto Networks announced that Prisma AIRS now integrates natively with Azure AI Foundry, enabling direct prompt and response scanning through the Prisma AIRS AI Runtime Security API. The integration provides real-time, model-agnostic threat detection for prompt injection, sensitive data leakage, malicious code and URLs, and toxic outputs, and supports custom topic filters. By embedding security into AI development workflows, teams gain production-grade protections without slowing innovation; the feature is available now via an early access program.

🛡️ Meta has provided selected long‑time bug bounty researchers with a new tool, WhatsApp Research Proxy, to streamline analysis of WhatsApp's network protocol and reduce barriers to in‑depth research. The company is also running a pilot that invites research teams to focus on platform abuse with internal engineering and tooling support. Meta said it has paid more than $25 million to over 1,400 researchers in 15 years and recently added anti‑scraping protections after a study showed an account‑enumeration technique able to map billions of users.

🚀 Microsoft announced integration of Anthropic's Claude models into Microsoft Foundry, making Azure the only cloud to provide both Claude and GPT frontier models on a single platform. The release brings Claude Haiku 4.5, Sonnet 4.5, and Opus 4.1 to Foundry with enterprise governance, observability, and deployment controls. Foundry Agent Service, the Model Context Protocol, skills-based modularity, and a model router are highlighted as tools to operationalize agentic workflows for coding, research, cybersecurity, and business automation. Token-based pricing tiers for the Claude models are published for standard deployments.

🎧 Amazon Polly now offers five new Generative TTS voices—Austrian German (Hannah), Irish English (Niamh), Brazilian Portuguese (Camila), Belgian Dutch (Lisa), and Korean (Seoyeon)—bringing the Generative engine to thirty-one voices across twenty locales. The Generative engine is generally available in three new Asia Pacific regions: Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and all Generative voices are now available in US East (N. Virginia), Europe (Frankfurt), and US West (Oregon). These updates expand Amazon Polly's managed text-to-speech capabilities for conversational AI and speech content creation.

🚀 Amazon RDS now supports R8gd and M8gd instances for Optimized Reads on Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL and RDS for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB, offering improved price-performance. Optimized Reads uses local NVMe-based SSDs to store ephemeral data (temporary tables and evicted pages) to reduce network I/O and boost read latency and throughput. AWS reports up to 165% better throughput and up to 120% better price-performance on R8gd versus R6g for Aurora PostgreSQL. These instances are available in select US, Europe, and Asia Pacific regions and can be enabled via the Console, CLI, or SDK.

🛡️ AWS has updated the Transfer Family Terraform module to support automated malware scanning workflows for files transferred to S3. The module provisions GuardDuty S3 Protection–based scan pipelines, dynamic routing based on results, and threat notifications in a single deployment. It preserves folder structure, allows granular S3 prefix targeting, and helps ensure only verified clean files reach applications and data lakes.

🚀 Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched EC2 I7ie instances in the Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region. Designed for large storage I/O–intensive workloads, I7ie pairs 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors with 3rd‑generation AWS Nitro SSDs to deliver up to 40% better compute and up to 65% improved real‑time storage performance versus I3en. Instances support up to 120 TB local NVMe density, up to twice the vCPU and memory of prior generations, nine size options, and up to 100 Gbps networking with 60 Gbps EBS bandwidth.

🛡️ Fortinet and Crime Stoppers International (CSI) have launched the Cybercrime Bounty program, a global initiative enabling secure, anonymous reporting of cybercriminal activity. Validated reports will feed Fortinet’s threat intelligence to support law enforcement investigations and potential prosecutions. The program scales deterrence by combining community-sourced tips with expert analysis, building on decades of Fortinet collaboration with INTERPOL and other public-private partners.

⚠️ Cloudflare is investigating an outage that has produced widespread 500 internal server errors and impacted its Dashboard and API, disrupting access to numerous customer websites and platforms. The company first reported support portal availability issues and then an incident at 11:48 UTC affecting the Cloudflare Global Network, with multiple European nodes observed offline. Downdetector logged tens of thousands of reports, and Cloudflare says it is working to mitigate the incident; partial recovery has been reported for Access and WARP while remediation continues for application services.

🔔 Cisco Talos has introduced a new Severity rule group for Snort3 in Cisco Secure Firewall, grouping detection rules by CVSS-derived severity tiers (low, medium, high, critical). Administrators can set coverage by time range — from the last two years up to all historical vulnerabilities — to balance detection depth and performance. This makes it easier to align rules with patch cycles, compliance needs, and organizational risk priorities while reducing manual tuning.

🔎 AWS CloudFormation now validates change sets for three common template errors—invalid property syntax, resource name conflicts with existing account resources, and S3 bucket emptiness constraints on delete—before provisioning begins. If validation fails, the change set status is marked 'FAILED' and includes detailed failure messages and property paths to pinpoint issues. Runtime failures can still occur during execution, so CloudFormation also groups stack events by a unique operation ID that you can view in the Console or via the describe-operation API to filter and diagnose failures quickly. Together these capabilities are intended to shorten deployment cycles and cut troubleshooting time from minutes to seconds.

🔁 AWS CloudFormation now offers drift-aware change sets to detect and reconcile configuration drift by comparing a new template, the last-deployed template, and the live infrastructure state. The feature lets you preview deployment impacts on drifted resources, avoid unintended overwrites, and revert out-of-band changes. Create a change set in the console as “Drift-aware” or call CreateChangeSet with --deployment-mode REVERT_DRIFT. Available in Regions where CloudFormation is offered.

📈 Amazon Redshift now supports Just‑In‑Time (JIT) ANALYZE for Apache Iceberg tables, automatically collecting table‑ and column‑level statistics during query execution. The feature uses intelligent heuristics and lightweight sketch data structures to determine when runtime statistics will improve optimizer decisions and to build high‑quality statistics on the fly. JIT ANALYZE is generally available in all AWS regions with Redshift and requires no configuration changes to begin improving query plans and performance.

📦 AWS announced the general availability of Supplementary Packages for Amazon Linux (SPAL), a curated repository offering thousands of pre-built EPEL9-compatible packages for Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023). SPAL reduces the need to compile software from source, accelerating deployments and lowering operational overhead for developers, system administrators, and DevOps teams. Packages are derived from community EPEL9 sources with AWS applying security patches as they become available upstream. SPAL is available across all AWS Commercial Regions, including GovCloud and China.

🚀 AWS has made high performance, storage-optimized Amazon EC2 I7i instances available in Asia Pacific (Melbourne, Mumbai, Osaka) and Middle East (UAE) regions. Powered by 5th‑generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and 3rd‑generation AWS Nitro SSDs, I7i delivers up to 23% better compute performance and more than 10% better price performance versus prior I4i instances. I7i offers up to 45 TB of NVMe storage with significant reductions in storage I/O latency and variability, supports torn-write prevention up to 16 KB blocks, and is offered in eleven sizes including bare metal, with up to 100 Gbps network and 60 Gbps EBS bandwidth.