All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔁 Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) now supports snapshot copy for AWS Local Zones, enabling point-in-time local snapshots to be copied to the parent Region or another Local Zone. The feature is generally available and accessible via the AWS Console, CLI, and SDKs. This capability helps customers meet disaster recovery, data migration, and compliance requirements by storing snapshots in Amazon S3 within the chosen Region or Local Zone.

⚠️ Google is investigating authentication failures that prevent sign-ins to Clever and ClassLink on affected ChromeOS devices running build 16328.55.0 with Chrome 139.0.7258.137. The problem can disrupt Single Sign‑On and some 2‑Step Verification flows, blocking access to educational platforms. As temporary mitigations, administrators can roll back devices to ChromeOS M138 via the Google Admin console or change LoginAuthenticationBehavior to use the default GAIA authentication flow while Google validates a fix.

📝 Microsoft is testing a change that will enable autosave and save new documents to OneDrive by default in Word for Windows, delivered first to Microsoft 365 Insiders in the Beta Channel with Version 2509 (Build 19221.20000) or later. Microsoft says the feature will come to Excel and PowerPoint for Windows later this year. Users can choose a local folder instead or toggle the behavior off via the Save page in Word options. Microsoft lists several known issues being addressed during testing.

🔧 AWS IoT ExpressLink technical specification v1.3 introduces expanded Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) capabilities and a new set of I/O control commands that enable host processors to manage module pins. The BLE enhancements make it easier for devices to advertise presence and capabilities and to pair securely within a local Personal Area Network (PAN). The I/O control commands allow an ExpressLink-powered module to act as a flexible digital and analog I/O expander. AWS Partners including Espressif and u‑blox have adopted the update for their Wi‑Fi and BLE qualified modules.

🚀 Amazon EC2 High Memory U7i instances (u7i-12tb.224xlarge) with 12TiB of DDR5 memory are now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region. Powered by custom fourth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable (Sapphire Rapids) processors, the U7i-12tb offers 896 vCPUs, ENA Express support, and up to 100 Gbps for both EBS and network throughput. These instances are designed for mission-critical in-memory databases and large transactional workloads such as SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL Server, enabling faster data loading, backups, and higher transaction processing throughput.

🔒 David Stone and Marina Kaganovich from Google Cloud’s Office of the CISO warn that cyber-enabled fraud (CEF) is scaling rapidly and presents severe financial and reputational risk. The post cites FBI data — $13.7 billion in losses in 2024 — and highlights common tactics such as phishing, ransomware, account takeover, and business email compromise. It urges CISOs and boards to shift from siloed defenses to a proactive, enterprise-wide posture using frameworks like FS-ISAC’s Cyber Fraud Prevention Framework and Google Cloud detection and protection capabilities.

🔊 Amazon Connect now provides generative text-to-speech voices—20 generative-enhanced voices across English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian. Use them for welcome messages, policy announcements, or dynamic conversational AI, configurable in the drag-and-drop flow designer via the “Set Voice” block or through public APIs. Available in US East (N. Virginia), Europe (Frankfurt), and US West (Oregon). Pricing options include unlimited AI or individual per-use pricing.

🚀 GKE Autopilot now runs on a container-optimized compute platform that rethinks autoscaling to deliver near-real-time capacity. The platform uses dynamically resizable VMs and a pool of pre-provisioned compute so nodes can be resized or allocated without disrupting workloads. Customers on GKE Autopilot 1.32+ get faster pod scheduling, improved HPA responsiveness, and support for in-place pod resize out of the box. Google recommends the general purpose compute class for small, gradually scaling services.

🔔 This month Google Cloud expanded its AI stack across models, tooling, and security. Highlights include Gemini 2.5 Flash with native image generation and SynthID watermarking on Vertex AI, new Veo video models, the Gemini CLI, and a global Anthropic Claude endpoint. Google also published 101 gen‑AI blueprints, developer guidance for choosing tools, and security advances for agents and AI workloads.

🔔 This Google Cloud roundup summarizes recent product milestones, GA launches, previews, and integrations across the data analytics, BI, and database portfolio. It highlights updates to BigQuery, Firestore, Cloud SQL, AlloyDB, and adjacent services aimed at easing ingestion, migration, and AI-driven operations. Notable items include MongoDB-compatible Firestore GA, PSC networking improvements for Database Migration Service, and a redesigned BigQuery data ingestion experience. The post also emphasizes resilience and DR enhancements such as immutable backups and Near Zero Downtime maintenance.

🚀 AWS has made the new M8i and M8i-flex EC2 instances generally available, powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors exclusive to AWS. The instances offer up to 15% better price-performance and 2.5x the memory bandwidth versus previous Intel-based generations, and AWS reports up to 20% higher performance compared with M7i and M7i-flex with larger gains for specific workloads. Initial availability includes US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Spain).

🔐 Amazon announced that OpenSearch Serverless now supports attribute-based authorization (ABAC) for Data Plane APIs, enabling identity policies in AWS IAM to control data read and write operations on collections. The release also introduces resource control policy (RCP), a new AWS Organizations–managed policy type that enforces organization-wide preventative controls centrally. Customers should check regional availability and consult the documentation for implementation guidance.

🤖 Cloudflare offers a one-click path to conversational search by combining Microsoft’s NLWeb open standard with Cloudflare’s managed retrieval engine, AutoRAG. The integration crawls and indexes site content into R2 and a managed vector store, serves embeddings and inference via Workers AI, and exposes both a user-facing /ask endpoint and an agent-focused /mcp endpoint. Publishers get continuous re-indexing, controlled agent access, and observability through an AI Gateway, removing much of the infrastructure burden for conversational experiences.

🔐 Cloudflare introduces signed agents, a new classification that cryptographically verifies agent-originated traffic using Web Bot Auth HTTP message signatures. Signed agents represent end-user-directed automation rather than operator-owned crawlers, enabling sites to allow or block them with finer granularity. The update adds signed agents to the public Radar directory and to the bots and agents dashboard for visibility and submissions.

🛡️Cloudflare has rebranded its AI Audit beta as AI Crawl Control and moved the tool to general availability, giving publishers more granular ways to manage AI crawlers. Paid customers can now block specific bots and return customizable HTTP 402 Payment Required responses containing contact or licensing instructions. The feature aims to replace the binary allow-or-block choice with a channel for negotiation and potential monetization, while pay-per-crawl remains in beta.

🔒 Fortinet SecOps unifies telemetry across network, endpoints, cloud, and email into a single data lake, reducing blind spots and simplifying investigation. Powered by FortiGuard AI and integrated tools like FortiSIEM, FortiEDR, FortiNDR, and FortiSOAR, it couples behavior-based detection with automated playbook-driven response. The platform emphasizes analyst-centric dashboards, Security Fabric enforcement, and continuous exposure management to lower false positives and accelerate containment.

🛡️ Amazon Web Services announced expanded support for VPC Traffic Mirroring, enabling the feature on a broader set of EC2 instance types. With this update, Traffic Mirroring can now be enabled on all Nitro v4 instances and is available across all regions. The capability replicates instance network traffic to security and monitoring appliances for use cases such as content inspection, threat monitoring, and troubleshooting; consult the AWS documentation for the complete supported instance lists and Nitro system mappings.

☁️ Google Public Sector has been awarded a $48 million DLA Enterprise Platform contract to migrate the Defense Logistics Agency to a DoD‑accredited commercial cloud. The multi‑phased program will move key infrastructure and data to a modern, AI‑ready Google Cloud foundation and enable BigQuery, Looker, and Vertex AI analytics. Emphasizing secure‑by‑design infrastructure and Mandiant threat intelligence, the effort aims to reduce costs, improve resiliency, and accelerate AI‑driven logistics and transportation management.

🛠️ AWS now supports creating Amazon S3 Tables and namespaces with AWS CloudFormation and the AWS CDK, extending existing support for table buckets. This enables developers and teams to provision, update, and manage S3 Tables resources using infrastructure-as-code workflows, improving repeatability and version control across multiple AWS accounts. The CloudFormation and CDK integrations are available in all Regions where S3 Tables are offered, and AWS points users to the CloudFormation, CDK, and S3 Tables documentation to get started.

🔐 EuroDaT describes how its safeAML platform, built on Google Cloud and Google Kubernetes Engine, enables controlled, pseudonymous exchange of sensitive transaction data between banks. Acting as a neutral data trustee, EuroDaT never accesses personal content while automating secure, auditable workflows that replace error-prone phone calls. Pilots with German banks show faster, more accurate suspicion assessments and lower false positives.