All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🆕 Amazon SageMaker notebook instances now support Amazon Linux 2023, giving data scientists and developers access to an updated, rpm-based runtime for managed Jupyter notebooks. AL2023 is the successor to AL2, offering a predictable two-year major release cadence and five years of long-term support. Enhanced security features include SELinux and FIPS 140-3 validated cryptographic modules. New notebook instances can be launched with either AL2023 or AL2.

🔐 This post explains how to configure customer trust stores to accept public certificates issued through AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) and clarifies the role of Amazon Trust Services. It warns that ACM issues certificates via dynamically selected intermediates, so trusting only intermediates or pinning end-entity certificates can cause outages. The recommended action is to install five Amazon root CAs in your trust stores and to validate configuration across Windows, Amazon Linux, and Java environments.

⚠️ Microsoft is addressing an ongoing outage that is preventing users from accessing Microsoft 365 services, including Teams, Exchange Online, and the Microsoft 365 admin center. The incident is being tracked on the Service Health Dashboard and Microsoft is publishing updates on its Service Health Status page. The outage is also affecting Microsoft Entra single sign-on and Multi-Factor Authentication, with some users unable to receive MFA prompts or authenticate.

🔒 This post contrasts Amazon Cognito's two primary UI approaches—managed login and a fully custom UI—and outlines feature, security, and operational trade-offs to guide architects and developers. Managed login (offered as a modern branding editor or the Hosted UI classic) offloads hosting, scaling, and maintenance while providing OAuth2 flows, federation with social and OIDC/SAML providers, passwordless options, and CloudTrail action logging. A custom UI gives full control over UX, session management, localization, and supports custom authentication flows via Lambda triggers, but requires development, hosting, and operational responsibility under the AWS Shared Responsibility Model.

📥 Microsoft is enabling threshold-based auto-archiving by default for Exchange Online, moving the oldest items to users' archive mailboxes when primary mailbox usage approaches 90%, provided an archive is provisioned and has available space. The Managed Folder Assistant will continuously monitor mailbox sizes and archive until usage drops below the threshold. Rollout begins this month for public clouds and is scheduled for government clouds in November; users can tag items with the Never Move to Archive flag to prevent them from being archived. The change complements recent Defender for Office 365 updates that detect email bombing attacks.

🤝 VirusTotal announces simplified access and tiered pricing to keep the platform open and sustainable. The update preserves a robust, free VT Community tier for researchers and educators while introducing a dedicated Contributor Tier for engine partners that includes blindspot feeds, priority support, and early feature access. New paid tiers (VT Lite, VT Duet) target small teams and large organizations respectively, with pricing aligned to usage and contribution.

⚙️ AWS has made Amazon EC2 I7ie instances available in the South America (São Paulo) region. Designed for high-density, storage-optimized workloads, I7ie uses 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors and 3rd-generation AWS Nitro SSDs, offering up to 120 TB of local NVMe and up to twice the vCPUs and memory of the prior generation. AWS reports up to 40% better compute, up to 65% better storage performance, and lower I/O latency and variability versus I3en, with up to 100 Gbps network and 60 Gbps EBS throughput.

🚀 AWS announced general availability of new Amazon EC2 M8a instances powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC (Turin) processors with up to 4.5 GHz. M8a offers up to 30% higher performance, up to 19% better price-performance, and 45% more memory bandwidth vs M7a, with strong gains on JVM and Cassandra benchmarks. The family includes 12 sizes (two bare-metal), is SAP-certified, built on the AWS Nitro System, and is initially available in US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon) and Europe (Spain).

🚀 AWS announced general availability of the new Amazon EC2 M8a general-purpose instances powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors (Turin), with a maximum frequency of 4.5 GHz and up to 30% higher performance over M7a. M8a instances deliver 45% more memory bandwidth and notable benchmark improvements—60% faster on GroovyJVM and up to 39% faster on Cassandra. They are SAP-certified, come in 12 sizes including two bare-metal options, and are available in US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Spain). Customers can purchase M8a via On-Demand, Spot, and Savings Plans.

🛡️ Modern cloud work lives across email, files, chat, and a mesh of integrations, and attackers increasingly exploit trusted OAuth grants rather than compromising accounts directly. In early August the actor behind recent Salesforce intrusions used stolen Drift email tokens to access a small set of Google Workspace mailboxes; Google revoked the tokens and disabled the integration on August 9. Material Security advocates shifting from perimeter-only defenses to content-centric controls such as message-level MFA, OAuth governance, and automated containment to make stolen tokens far less damaging.

🚀 Amazon EC2 M8gd instances with up to 11.4 TB of local NVMe SSD storage are now available in Europe (London), Asia Pacific (Sydney, Malaysia), and Canada (Central). Powered by AWS Graviton4, they deliver up to 30% better compute performance than Graviton3-based instances, up to 40% higher I/O performance for databases, and up to 20% faster real-time analytics queries. Instances come in 12 sizes, offer up to 50 Gbps networking and 40 Gbps EBS bandwidth, support EFA on large sizes, and allow ±25% adjustment of network and EBS bandwidth via EC2 instance bandwidth weighting.

🚀 Amazon EC2 R8gd instances are now available in Europe (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Sydney, Malaysia), South America (São Paulo), and Canada (Central). Powered by AWS Graviton4, they deliver up to 30% better compute performance than Graviton3-based instances and include up to 11.4 TB of local NVMe SSD for low-latency storage. Instances offer up to 50 Gbps networking, EFA on larger sizes, and adjustable network/EBS bandwidth weighting to better optimize workloads.

🔍 Amazon Q Developer now offers integrated pricing and cost estimation, enabling developers and architects to query product attributes, regional availability, and service pricing in natural language. The assistant retrieves data from the AWS Price List APIs to provide workload cost estimates and side-by-side comparisons, so teams can evaluate cost/performance tradeoffs without manually consulting multiple pricing pages. Access the feature via the Amazon Q chat panel in the AWS Management Console.

🔎 FortiCNAPP consolidates related cloud signals into composite alerts, reducing noise and prioritizing high-confidence incidents so SOC teams can focus on what matters. Its Observation Timeline sequences logins, API calls, commands, and network traffic into a single, evidence-backed storyline. An AI Alert Assistant supports natural-language queries and returns structured answers, visual relationships, and prioritized remediation steps to accelerate containment and help junior analysts act confidently.

🛡️ Check Point has partnered with HackShield, an award-winning cyber education platform, to deliver gamified cybersecurity learning to children aged 8–12. The collaboration will expand access to age-appropriate resources and help cultivate resilient Cyber Agents in schools, families, and communities. The initiative aligns with Check Point’s mission to build lasting cybersecurity foundations and promote safe online habits among the next generation.

🔒 Salesforce introduced two AI agents on its Agentforce platform that monitor security activity and streamline compliance workflows for the Security Center and Privacy Center. The security agent analyzes event logs to detect anomalous behavior, accelerates investigations by assembling context and remediation plans, and can autonomously freeze or isolate suspicious accounts when authorized. The privacy agent maps metadata and policies against frameworks like GDPR and CCPA, surfaces exposures, and can reclassify or apply erasure policies to reduce compliance risk.

⚡ Amazon EC2 C8gd instances with up to 11.4 TB of local NVMe SSD are now available in Europe (Ireland) and Asia Pacific (Sydney, Malaysia). Powered by AWS Graviton4 processors, they deliver up to 30% better performance than Graviton3 and accelerate I/O-intensive database and real-time analytics workloads. Built on the AWS Nitro System, C8gd offers 12 sizes, up to 50 Gbps network and up to 40 Gbps EBS bandwidth, with configurable bandwidth weighting (+25%) and EFA on select large sizes.

🚀 Amazon EC2 C7gd instances are now available in the Europe (Zurich) Region, offering up to 3.8 TB of local NVMe SSD block storage and DDR5 memory on the AWS Nitro System. These Graviton3-based instances deliver up to 45% improved real-time NVMe storage performance versus comparable Graviton2 instances and use up to 60% less energy for equivalent performance. They suit workloads needing high-speed, low-latency temporary storage such as scratch space, caches, and temp files, and AWS provides migration tools like the Graviton Fast Start program and Porting Advisor.

🗺️ Amazon Location Service updated Vietnam mapping data to reflect the nationwide administrative reorganization that took effect on July 1, 2025. The refresh consolidates provincial-level units from 63 to 34 (28 provinces and 6 centrally managed cities) and reduces commune-level units from 10,310 to 3,321 while preserving street-level address accuracy. Place names and administrative components in POI records were updated, and the revised data is automatically available to customers querying Vietnam addresses. The update supports logistics, e-commerce, and public-service use cases such as delivery zone planning, service-area management, and address validation.

🔒 Docker has opened unlimited, subscription-based access to its Hardened Images catalog starting today, offering a 30-day free trial to make near-zero CVE container images affordable for startups and SMBs. These images are built from source, signed, rootless by default, include SBOM and VEX data, and are covered by a seven-day patch SLA for newly discovered CVEs. Docker says removing nonessential components can reduce attack surface by up to 95%, and hardened variants are compatible with Alpine and Debian and can be adopted by changing a single Dockerfile line.