All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔎 Google added two BigQuery tools—ask_data_insights and BigQuery Forecast—to the MCP Toolbox and the Agent Development Kit (ADK) to enable conversational analytics and time-series predictions for agents. ask_data_insights uses the Conversational Analytics API to interpret plain-English questions, generate and run queries, and return summarised answers with a step‑by‑step log for transparency. BigQuery Forecast leverages BigQuery ML’s TimesFM model via AI.FORECAST so agents can run forecasting jobs directly inside BigQuery without separate ML infrastructure.

🔌 AWS expanded 10 Gbps and 100 Gbps Direct Connect dedicated connections with MACsec encryption at the Equinix BG1 data center near Bogota, Colombia. Customers can now provision private, direct network access from this location to all public AWS Regions (except China), AWS GovCloud Regions, and AWS Local Zones. The enhancement delivers more consistent, lower-latency and encrypted connectivity for enterprises and partners in the region.

🧩 Deploy Payload to Cloudflare Workers in one click with a template that provisions D1 and R2 bindings. The Payload team ported the project to OpenNext and implemented custom adapters: a Drizzle-based adapter that maps D1 results for SQLite compatibility and an R2 storage adapter that uses bindings to avoid token management. They used Wrangler remote bindings for migrations and applied Hyperdrive and D1 read replicas to cut latency and improve global read performance.

🛡️ Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) now supports additional FIPS 140-3 validated endpoints across several AWS Regions in the United States and Canada. These FIPS-compliant endpoints allow organizations, including federal contractors, to meet requirements to use validated cryptographic modules when encrypting sensitive data. The new endpoints support requests over dual-stack public and VPC endpoints and are available in US East (N. Virginia and Ohio), US West (N. California and Oregon), Canada (Central and Calgary) and AWS GovCloud (US). Customers can use these endpoints to run SNS workloads that require FIPS 140-3 validated cryptography within the listed regions.

🌐 Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) now supports IPv6 for API requests in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, giving customers the option to use IPv6 or IPv4 over dual‑stack public and VPC endpoints. The new endpoints are validated under FIPS 140-3, and SNS now supports IPv6 across all AWS Regions where the service is available.

🔐 Growing SMEs face rising security complexity and must choose between building internal XDR capabilities or outsourcing to managed MXDR services. The article contrasts Kaspersky Next XDR Optimum for teams aiming to develop in-house expertise with Kaspersky Next MXDR Optimum for organizations prioritizing 24/7 monitoring and lower operational overhead. It highlights key XDR features—sandboxing, Active Directory integration, robust investigation tools and security-awareness integration—and explains how managed services can both provide immediate protection and accelerate staff training.

🔁 AWS Transform for VMware now generates reusable Terraform modules from discovered VMware network definitions, complementing existing AWS CloudFormation and CDK outputs. The feature converts source network configurations into modular, customizable infrastructure code that fits into current deployment pipelines. It is available in all Regions where the service is offered and helps teams preserve operational consistency during migrations. By producing Terraform modules, the service enables reuse of Terraform-based workflows, reduces manual configuration effort, and supports teams that prefer Terraform for network automation.

🔒 VMware certifications are rising as IT teams confront hybrid, multi-cloud, and security complexity. Sponsored by VMUG, the article argues that certification has shifted from a resume boost to an operational requirement that helps reduce misconfiguration-driven breaches and embed security best practices. It highlights measurable financial value per certified employee, the role of VMUG Advantage in providing exam discounts and study resources, and how certifications support hiring, onboarding, and career resiliency.

🔒 AWS announces that AWS Firewall Manager is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region. The service enables cloud security administrators and site reliability engineers to centrally create, deploy, and maintain defense-in-depth security policies across accounts, including AWS WAF protections and managed rule sets. By centralizing policy management, teams can reduce manual configuration, ensure consistent enforcement, and lower operational overhead. Customers should consult the documentation and region table for full feature and pricing details.

🔒 AWS has added four service-specific IAM condition keys for AWS Transfer Family, enabling administrators to write more granular policies and SCPs. These keys let you constrain server protocols, endpoint types, and storage domains at request time. For example, use transfer:RequestServerEndpointType to block public servers or transfer:RequestServerProtocols to allow only SFTP. The keys are available in all Regions where the service is offered.

🔒 AWS Storage Gateway now supports VPC endpoint policies, allowing administrators to attach fine‑grained endpoint policies to VPC endpoints that control access to Storage Gateway direct APIs. Administrators can scope access by principal, action, and resource to reduce attack surface and enforce data protection controls. The capability is available in all Regions where Storage Gateway operates; review endpoint policies to align with your security and compliance requirements.

📣 AWS announces general availability of AWS Service Quotas integration with AWS Step Functions, allowing customers to view account-level quota values in the Service Quotas console and monitor utilization with Amazon CloudWatch metrics. Users can request quota increases directly from the console, and eligible changes are applied automatically to reduce manual intervention. The feature is available in all commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions where Step Functions is provided and can be accessed via the console or CLI.

🔒 Customers can now attach boot and data volumes backed by Dell PowerStore and HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 arrays to Amazon EC2 instances on AWS Outposts, with support for authenticated and encrypted volumes. This extends external block volume support alongside NetApp and Pure Storage, enabling use of on‑premises enterprise arrays for OS boot volumes and high‑performance data volumes. AWS provides automation scripts via AWS Samples and access through the Console or CLI; third‑party integration is available on Outposts 2U servers and racks at no additional charge.

🚀Today AWS announced that Amazon Elastic VMware Service (Amazon EVS) is available in all availability zones in the Asia Pacific (Singapore) and Europe (London) Regions. Amazon EVS runs VMware Cloud Foundation directly within your Amazon VPC on EC2 bare-metal instances powered by AWS Nitro. You can deploy a complete VCF environment in hours using the guided configuration workflow or the AWS CLI with automated deployment, enabling faster migrations, lower latency for end users, and improved compliance and resiliency.

🔒 Microsoft announced the general availability of the Sentinel data lake and public previews of Sentinel Graph and the Sentinel Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. The release broadens Sentinel from a traditional SIEM into a unified, agentic security platform designed to ingest and correlate structured and semi-structured signals at scale. It is intended to give AI agents such as Security Copilot and developer tools in VS Code with GitHub Copilot richer contextual access for detection, retroactive hunting, and automated response while integrating with Defender and Purview.

🛡️ Microsoft announced expanded agentic security capabilities in Microsoft Sentinel, including the general availability of the Sentinel data lake and public preview of Sentinel Graph and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server to enable AI agents to reason over unified security data. Sentinel ingests structured and semi-structured signals, builds vectorized, graph-based context, and integrates with Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Purview. Security Copilot now offers a no-code agent builder and developer workflows via VS Code/GitHub Copilot, while enhanced governance controls (Entra Agent ID, PII guardrails, prompt shields) aim to secure agent lifecycles.

📈 Supervisors and managers can now customize Amazon Connect service level calculations directly from the analytics dashboards. The metric configuration lets teams define time thresholds for when a contact is considered to meet service levels and select which contact outcomes to include. Options include counting callbacks, excluding contacts transferred out while waiting, and omitting short abandons using a configurable threshold. The capability is available in all AWS regions, enabling a view of service level performance that better aligns with business operations.

🔒 Databricks has introduced Data Intelligence for Cybersecurity, an AI-driven platform that unifies fragmented security telemetry on its Lakehouse architecture to provide real-time, context-rich threat detection. The offering includes Agent Bricks to build governed AI agents, conversational dashboards, and natural-language queries for nontechnical stakeholders. Early adopters such as Arctic Wolf, Palo Alto Networks, and SAP report sharper detection, lower costs, and faster operations, while Databricks expands integrations across a broad partner ecosystem to challenge established SIEM and analytics vendors.

🛡️ Wing Security outlines how enterprises must evolve defenses to protect the modern AI application supply chain. The article explains that rapid AI sprawl, interapplication integrations, and new data exposure vectors create blind spots traditional controls were not built to handle. By extending its SaaS Security Posture Management foundation, Wing Security offers continuous discovery, real-time monitoring, vendor analytics, and adaptive governance to reduce supply chain, data leakage, and compliance risk.

🔔 AWS IAM Identity Center is now deployable in 36 AWS Regions, including Asia Pacific (Bangkok) and Mexico Central (Querétaro). The service provides centralized workforce access, single sign-on, and integration with existing identity sources to streamline account and application access across AWS. It powers personalized experiences in AWS applications such as Amazon Q and supports user-aware access auditing for services like Amazon Redshift. IAM Identity Center is available at no additional cost in these Regions.