All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

📅 Amazon Connect now supports scheduling of individual agents, allowing managers to create and publish schedules for specific employees and automatically merge them with existing business unit schedules. For example, when onboarding 100 new agents into a unit with published schedules for the next two months, you can schedule only the new hires and merge without regenerating or copying entire schedules. This eliminates manual workarounds, improves manager productivity, and increases operational efficiency. The capability is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Connect agent scheduling is supported.

🤖 AWS Marketplace now offers flexible pricing and simplified deployment for AI agents and tools, including contract-based and usage-based options for Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime containers. The update also streamlines OAuth credential management via Quick Launch for API-based agents and allows supported remote MCP servers procured through Marketplace to be used as MCP targets on AgentCore Gateway. These enhancements reduce deployment complexity and give partners more pricing flexibility while improving scalability for customers.

🔒 The Model Context Protocol (MCP) Proxy for AWS is now generally available, offering a client-side proxy that lets MCP clients connect to remote, AWS-hosted MCP servers using AWS SigV4 authentication. It supports agentic development tools such as Amazon Q Developer CLI, Kiro, Cursor, and agent frameworks like Strands Agents, and interoperates with MCP servers built on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway or Runtime. The open-source Proxy includes safety controls (read-only mode), configurable retry logic, and logging for troubleshooting, and can be installed from source, via Python package managers, or as a container to integrate with existing MCP-supported tools.

🔁 AWS announced that Amazon VPC IP Address Manager (IPAM) can now automate prefix list updates using a prefix list resolver (PLR). Administrators can define business rules in IPAM to synchronize prefix lists with IP address ranges from VPCs, subnets, and IPAM pools, and reference those lists in route tables and security groups. This automation removes the need for manual updates and reduces operational overhead. The feature is available in all AWS Regions where IPAM is supported, including AWS China and AWS GovCloud (US).

🔹 Amazon Lightsail now offers three larger instance bundles with up to 64 vCPUs and 256 GB memory, announced in October 2025. The bundles are available with pre-configured Linux OS and application blueprints and support both IPv6-only and dual-stack networking. Blueprints include WordPress, cPanel & WHM, Plesk, Drupal, Magento, MEAN, LAMP, Node.js, Amazon Linux, Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, AlmaLinux, and Windows. These higher-performance instances enable scaling of web and application servers, large databases, virtual desktops, batch processing, and enterprise applications, and they are available in all AWS Regions where Lightsail is offered.

🌐 Amazon RDS now extends IPv6 support to publicly accessible databases, enabling dual-stack (IPv4 and IPv6) connectivity for both RDS and Aurora publicly accessible instances. This builds on existing IPv6 support for privately accessible databases in a VPC and lets teams scale beyond IPv4 address limits and assign contiguous IP ranges to microservices. The feature is available in all AWS regions where private IPv6 RDS is offered, and can be enabled via the AWS CLI or Management Console.

🔒 ThreatLocker has released DAC for macOS in Beta, extending its configuration-scanning capability to Apple endpoints. Using the existing ThreatLocker agent, the feature can scan Macs up to four times daily and surface risky settings—FileVault, firewall, sharing/remote access, admin accounts, Gatekeeper, update policies—directly in the same console used for Windows. Findings are grouped by endpoint and category and include step-by-step remediation plus mappings to frameworks such as CIS, NIST, ISO 27001, and HIPAA. The aim is to make misconfigurations visible and remediable before they become security incidents.

🔌 AWS announced USB redirection support for Amazon WorkSpaces using the Amazon DCV protocol, enabling users to access locally connected USB peripherals from their virtual desktops. Supported devices include credit card readers, 3D mice, and other specialized hardware. The capability is limited to WorkSpaces Personal running Windows and accessed from Windows clients; performance and compatibility may vary, so testing before allowlisting is recommended. The feature is available in all AWS Regions where WorkSpaces is offered.

🚀 Amazon expanded availability of TwelveLabs Pegasus 1.2 to US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), and Europe (Frankfurt) via Amazon Bedrock. Pegasus 1.2 is a video-first language model optimized for long-form video understanding, video-to-text generation, and temporal reasoning across visual, audio, and textual signals. The regional rollout brings the model closer to customers' data and end users, reducing latency and simplifying deployment architectures. Developers can now build enterprise-grade video intelligence applications in these regions.

🔒 Today's complex IT environments — multi-cloud, hybrid work, and AI — have expanded the attack surface, exposing limits of fragmented point solutions. The article argues that unifying networking and security on a natively integrated platform like VersaONE reduces blind spots, enforces consistent policies, and enables real-time threat detection and automated response using built-in AI. With zero trust access and microsegmentation, the platform aims to minimize lateral movement and simplify operations compared with bolt-together or 'platformized' vendor offerings.

🔒 WhatsApp is rolling out passkey-encrypted chat backups on iOS and Android, allowing users to secure backups with biometrics or a device screen lock instead of a password. Passkeys rely on a device-generated private/public key pair so the private key never leaves the device, reducing exposure to credential theft. Users can enable the feature under Settings > Chats > Chat backup > End-to-end encrypted backup. Meta has begun a global rollout that will reach users over the coming weeks and months.

🔒 Android applies layered Google AI to anticipate and block mobile scams before they reach users. Built-in protections—such as Google Messages spam filtering and on-device Scam Detection, plus Phone by Google automatic call blocking and Call Screen—identify conversational scam patterns and surface real-time warnings. Android blocks over 10 billion suspected malicious calls and messages monthly and recently stopped more than 100 million suspicious numbers from using RCS. Protections are ephemeral, on-device where possible, and continuously updated to adapt to evolving threats.

📱 Google says built-in scam defenses on Android prevent more than 10 billion suspected malicious calls and messages every month and have blocked over 100 million suspicious numbers from using RCS. The company uses on-device artificial intelligence to filter likely spam into the "spam & blocked" folder in Google Messages and recently rolled out safer link warnings for flagged messages. Analysis of user reports in August 2025 identified employment fraud as the most common scam type, while scammers increasingly employ group-message tactics and time-of-day scheduling to increase success rates.

🚀 Amazon ECS now supports built-in linear and canary deployment strategies to give teams finer control over traffic shifts during container rollouts. Linear deployments shift traffic in equal percentage steps with configurable step percentage and step bake time, while canary deployments route a small portion of traffic to the new revision for a configurable canary bake time before completing the shift. Both strategies provide a post-deployment bake time, support deployment lifecycle hooks, and can use Amazon CloudWatch alarms to detect failures and trigger automated rollbacks. The feature is available in all commercial AWS Regions and is supported via Console, SDK, CLI, CloudFormation, CDK, and Terraform for services using ALB or ECS Service Connect.

🔒 Amazon S3 Access Grants are now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Thailand) and AWS Mexico (Central) Regions. The feature maps corporate identities—such as Microsoft Entra ID or AWS IAM principals—to S3 datasets, enabling administrators to automate and scale dataset access. This reduces manual policy overhead and helps ensure consistent, auditable permissions. Check the AWS Region Table and product page for regional availability and details.

☁️ Global Payments partnered with Google Cloud to design a multi-region, highly available database architecture using Cloud SQL Enterprise Plus. The deployment spans three regions with zonal replication, read replicas, cascading replication, and Cloud SQL Auth Proxy integration to support low-latency reads and rapid failover. This configuration yields near-zero planned downtime, sub-minute RTO and zero RPO for Tier 1 workloads, while meeting PCI DSS, GDPR, and NIST requirements.

🔖 Starting today, Split Cost Allocation Data for Amazon EKS can import up to 50 Kubernetes custom labels per pod as cost allocation tags. You can attribute pod-level costs in the AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) using labels such as cost center, application, business unit, and environment. New customers enable the feature in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console; existing customers will have labels automatically imported but must activate them as cost allocation tags. After activation labels appear in CUR within 24 hours and can be visualized via the Containers Cost Allocation dashboard in Amazon QuickSight or queried with Amazon Athena.

🔒 Google Cloud has been migrating its infrastructure toward post-quantum cryptography for nearly a decade to mitigate Store Now, Decrypt Later (SNDL) risks. The company has deployed the standards-based ML-KEM (FIPS 203) for key exchange across internal traffic and the Google Cloud networking stack, and introduced ML-KEM capabilities in Cloud KMS (preview) for key generation, encapsulation, and decapsulation. It also added native support for ML-DSA and SLH-DSA in Cloud KMS to protect long-lived digital signatures, and is phasing quantum-safe certificate support into Certificate Authority Service to enable future PQC-ready PKI. Administrators will receive tooling to opt in, audit cryptographic assets, and manage transitions to hybrid or pure PQC deployments as standards mature.

🏆 Fortinet received two 2025 Crime Stoppers International awards—the Cybersecurity Leadership Award and the Corporate Leadership in Crime Prevention Award—for its global efforts to disrupt cybercrime through intelligence sharing, partnership, and workforce development. FortiGuard Labs and the Fortinet Training Institute are cited for delivering actionable threat intelligence and scalable education. The honors validate more than a decade of sustained public‑private collaboration and data‑driven prevention.

🚀 AWS has announced general availability of the Amazon EC2 Capacity Reservation Topology API, providing a hierarchical, per-account view of the relative location of capacity reservations for AI/ML and HPC workloads. The API represents reservations as a network node set so customers can assess proximity without launching instances. Paired with the Instance Topology API, it enables consistent job scheduling, capacity planning, and node ranking across distributed parallel workloads and is available in most major AWS regions.