All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔒 Browser extensions present a significant, often unmonitored enterprise risk: they can run privileged code, inject scripts into web apps, access cookies and local storage, and persist via background processes. Keep Aware offers a Buyer’s Guide to Browser Extension Management that outlines these technical attack surfaces and illustrates how to reduce exposure. The guide compares common controls — GPO/MDM, EDR, enterprise browsers — with purpose-built browser security extensions to show trade-offs between visibility, enforcement, and user experience.

🔒 AWS now offers VPC endpoints for Amazon CloudWatch Observability Access Manager (OAM), enabling private, in-region connectivity between your VPCs and CloudWatch OAM without traversing the public internet. The endpoints support both IPv4 and IPv6 and leverage AWS PrivateLink controls such as security groups and VPC endpoint policies. Available in all commercial regions, AWS GovCloud (US), and China Regions, this lets teams manage cross-account observability links and sinks from VPCs that have no internet access.

🔐 Security leaders often struggle to show boards how cyber risk affects revenue, governance and growth. The sponsored course Risk Reporting to the Board for Modern CISOs was created to teach practical skills for framing risk in business terms: concise dashboards, high-impact presentations, and building financial and strategic business cases. It also introduces Continuous Threat Exposure Management as a forward-looking reporting model.

🧰 AWS has added a LocalStack integration for Visual Studio Code that enables developers to test and debug serverless applications locally from the IDE. The integration connects VS Code to a LocalStack-emulated environment without manual port configuration or code changes, exposing emulated services such as AWS Lambda, Amazon SQS, Amazon API Gateway, and DynamoDB. Available through the AWS Toolkit for VS Code (v3.74.0+), a guided walkthrough installs the LocalStack CLI, creates a LocalStack profile, and lets developers switch profiles and deploy to the LocalStack environment at no additional AWS cost.

🔍The Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus collector — an agentless, fully managed Prometheus metrics collector — now vends logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs, improving visibility into target discovery, authentication, scraping, and ingestion. These logs surface details such as timeouts, remote-write failures, and other errors to aid troubleshooting. The feature is generally available in all regions where the service is offered; review CloudWatch logs pricing and the collector monitoring user guide to get started.

🔔 Amazon EventBridge now provides its API destinations capability in the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) and AWS Asia Pacific (Thailand) Regions. API destinations allow event buses to invoke HTTPS endpoints as rule targets and support flexible authentication methods such as API key and OAuth, while storing credentials securely in AWS Secrets Manager. This expansion reduces call latency for local workloads and simplifies secure, managed integrations. To get started, consult the EventBridge documentation for configuration guidance.

🛡️ Falcon Complete Hub delivers a unified interface inside the Falcon platform that consolidates Falcon Complete Next‑Gen MDR activities, escalations and expert guidance into a single operational view. It prioritizes critical actions, provides step‑by‑step remediation links and centralizes subscription status, announcements and knowledge resources to reduce decision latency. Backed by a 37‑minute mean time to respond and a four‑minute mean time to detect, the Hub converts MDR visibility into clear operational tasks and faster response.

🔐 Amazon Athena now supports single sign-on for its JDBC and ODBC drivers using AWS IAM Identity Center’s trusted identity propagation. With updated drivers (JDBC 3.6.0 and ODBC 2.0.5.0), analysts can connect from third‑party BI tools and SQL clients using corporate credentials while Lake Formation permissions are enforced and actions are logged. This removes the need for embedded credentials, simplifies identity‑based data governance, and streamlines access management across tools.

🛡️ This post explains how organizations can use AWS security services while keeping data within Dedicated Local Zones. It describes the AWS Nitro System for hardware-enforced isolation, AWS KMS with an external key store option, and continuous protection from Amazon Inspector and GuardDuty. It also covers certificate management via ACM, DDoS mitigation with AWS Shield, and centralized auditing through CloudTrail.

🎉 Microsoft announced that, starting today, individual Windows developers can publish applications to the Microsoft Store without paying registration fees. The policy covers Win32 (including .NET WPF and WinForms), UWP, PWA, .NET MAUI, and Electron apps; Microsoft will host MSIX-packaged binaries, sign apps for free, and pay for distribution so developers don't need their own CDN. Developers of non-gaming apps may also implement their own in-app payment systems and retain all revenue. To publish, creators sign in with a personal Microsoft account and must verify identity with a government ID and a selfie; no credit card is required.

🔁 The AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) CLI introduces cdk refactor (Preview), a new command that enables safe renaming, moving, and reorganization of constructs while preserving the state of deployed resources. It leverages CloudFormation refactor capabilities and automated mapping computation to prevent unintended resource replacement during code changes. Typical use cases include breaking up monolithic stacks, moving resources between stacks, and upgrading to higher-level constructs. The feature is available in all regions where AWS CDK is supported.

⚡ This post announces a reproducible recipe to deploy NVIDIA Dynamo for disaggregated LLM inference on Google Cloud’s AI Hypercomputer using Google Kubernetes Engine, vLLM, and A3 Ultra (H200) GPUs. The recipe separates prefill and decode phases across dedicated GPU pools to reduce contention and lower latency. It includes single-node and multi-node examples and step-by-step deployment actions. The repository provides configuration guidance and future plans for broader GPU and engine support.

🚀 GKE Inference Gateway and GKE Inference Quickstart are now generally available, bringing production-ready inferencing features built on AI Hypercomputer. New capabilities include prefix-aware load balancing, disaggregated serving, vLLM support on TPUs and Ironwood TPUs, and model streaming with Anywhere Cache to cut model load times. These features target faster time-to-first-token and time-per-output-token, higher throughput, and lower inference costs, while Quickstart offers data-driven accelerator and configuration recommendations.

🔁 AWS announced native anomaly detection enhancements for AWS IoT SiteWise, including automated model retraining, flexible promotion modes, and exposed model metrics. Retraining can be scheduled between 30 days and one year to keep models current with changing equipment conditions. Customers can choose automatic service-managed promotion or manual customer-managed promotion using exposed metrics such as precision, recall, and AUC. Multivariate detection is available in N. Virginia, Ireland, and Sydney.

🔒 Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS) now supports media ingest via interface VPC endpoints using AWS PrivateLink. This lets customers broadcast RTMP(S) streams privately to IVS Low-Latency channels and IVS Real-Time stages without traversing the public internet. Interface VPC endpoints can be created from within your VPC or from on-premises environments over AWS Direct Connect, providing private and reliable connectivity for live video workflows. The feature is available in US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt), and Europe (Ireland); standard PrivateLink pricing applies.

🛒 Google Cloud announced general availability of the Conversational Commerce agent on Vertex AI, a shopping-focused conversational assistant designed to guide customers from intent to purchase. The agent uses Gemini to interpret complex queries, supports context retention across sessions and devices, and offers administrative controls to boost, bury, or restrict products. Albertsons Cos. reports increased basket size in early use. Onboarding is presented as quick with minimal development effort via the Vertex AI console.

🔁 Google describes its Central Fleet program as a centralized, fungible pool of compute, memory, and storage that replaces team-level machine procurement. Teams request intent-based quotas rather than specific servers, and the fleet uses software-level orchestration via Borg to allocate and reallocate resources dynamically. Google reports that in 2024 the program avoided procurement with an embodied impact of roughly 260,000 metric tons CO2e, highlighting reductions in e-waste, embodied carbon, and improved energy efficiency while promoting a circular-economy approach.

📷 Google announced Pixel 10 phones will embed C2PA Content Credentials in every photo captured by the native Pixel Camera and display verification in Google Photos. The Pixel Camera app achieved Assurance Level 2 by combining Tensor G5, the certified Titan M2 security chip, and Android hardware-backed attestation. A privacy-first model uses anonymous enrollment, a strict no-logging policy, and a one-time certificate-per-image strategy to prevent linking. Pixel 10 also supports an on-device trusted timestamping mechanism so credentials remain verifiable offline.

🔒 AWS announced that Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway now supports AWS PrivateLink for private VPC access and adds invocation logging to Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon S3, and Amazon Data Firehose. These updates allow agent traffic to avoid the public internet while sending per-invocation logs to common observability and storage services. The combination improves network isolation, governance, and operational visibility. AgentCore Gateway is currently in preview in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Europe (Frankfurt).

🔗 Azure's Agent Factory blog emphasizes that interoperability is the key to moving agentic AI from isolated prototypes to enterprise-scale solutions. The post promotes open standards like Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent2Agent (A2A) to enable shared context, reusable tools, and cross-framework collaboration across runtimes such as Semantic Kernel. It explains how Azure AI Foundry combines these protocols with thousands of connectors, unified observability, and governance so agents can act across SaaS, legacy systems, and custom APIs without costly rewrites.