All news in category "Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch"

Azure Introduces Copilot Agents and AI Infrastructure

🚀 At Microsoft Ignite 2025, Microsoft unveiled a suite of Azure infrastructure and AI operational innovations built for scale, reliability, and security. Azure Copilot introduces an agentic operations model with six specialized agents—migration, deployment, optimization, observability, resiliency, and troubleshooting—designed to automate routine cloud management while enforcing RBAC and policy. The release also highlights new AI datacenter architecture (Fairwater), deployment of NVIDIA GB300 GPUs at scale, and platform improvements like Azure Boost and AKS Automatic to accelerate performance and reduce operational overhead.

Azure Ignite 2025: Azure's Agentic AI and Data Innovations

🚀 At Microsoft Ignite 2025, Azure introduced a coordinated set of agentic and data-first capabilities to accelerate enterprise AI adoption. Announcements include Microsoft Agent Factory (available), previews of Fabric IQ and Foundry IQ, expanded Foundry model choices (Anthropic, Cohere), and new database offerings like Azure HorizonDB and Azure DocumentDB. The updates emphasize unified data, model choice, and integrated security to simplify building, running, and governing AI agents at scale.

Security Copilot Agents Included with Microsoft 365 E5

🛡️ Microsoft is including Security Copilot agents in Microsoft 365 E5, embedding AI-driven assistants across Defender, Entra, Intune, and Purview to accelerate investigations and automate routine tasks. The rollout begins today for existing Security Copilot customers on E5 and will expand to all E5 tenants in the coming months with a 30-day notification. The announcement adds 12 Microsoft-built preview agents, 30+ partner agents, and support for customer-built agents to tailor workflows.

Ambient and Autonomous Security for the Agentic Era

🛡️ At Microsoft Ignite 2025, Microsoft set out an ambient, autonomous security approach for the emerging agentic era and announced a suite of tools to observe, secure, and govern AI agents and apps. The centerpiece is Microsoft Agent 365, a control plane providing an Entra-based registry, access controls, visualization, and integrations with Defender, Entra, and Purview to detect prompt-injection, prevent leakage, and enable auditing. Microsoft also expanded platform protections, enhanced Copilot data controls in Purview, and positioned Microsoft Sentinel and Security Copilot as agentic security pillars for detection and response.

Prisma AIRS Integration with Azure AI Foundry for Security

🔒 Palo Alto Networks announced that Prisma AIRS now integrates natively with Azure AI Foundry, enabling direct prompt and response scanning through the Prisma AIRS AI Runtime Security API. The integration provides real-time, model-agnostic threat detection for prompt injection, sensitive data leakage, malicious code and URLs, and toxic outputs, and supports custom topic filters. By embedding security into AI development workflows, teams gain production-grade protections without slowing innovation; the feature is available now via an early access program.

Meta Expands WhatsApp Security Research Effort

🛡️ Meta has provided selected long‑time bug bounty researchers with a new tool, WhatsApp Research Proxy, to streamline analysis of WhatsApp's network protocol and reduce barriers to in‑depth research. The company is also running a pilot that invites research teams to focus on platform abuse with internal engineering and tooling support. Meta said it has paid more than $25 million to over 1,400 researchers in 15 years and recently added anti‑scraping protections after a study showed an account‑enumeration technique able to map billions of users.

Anthropic Claude Models Available in Microsoft Foundry

🚀 Microsoft announced integration of Anthropic's Claude models into Microsoft Foundry, making Azure the only cloud to provide both Claude and GPT frontier models on a single platform. The release brings Claude Haiku 4.5, Sonnet 4.5, and Opus 4.1 to Foundry with enterprise governance, observability, and deployment controls. Foundry Agent Service, the Model Context Protocol, skills-based modularity, and a model router are highlighted as tools to operationalize agentic workflows for coding, research, cybersecurity, and business automation. Token-based pricing tiers for the Claude models are published for standard deployments.

AWS EC2 I7ie Instances Arrive in Singapore Region Now

🚀 Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched EC2 I7ie instances in the Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region. Designed for large storage I/O–intensive workloads, I7ie pairs 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors with 3rd‑generation AWS Nitro SSDs to deliver up to 40% better compute and up to 65% improved real‑time storage performance versus I3en. Instances support up to 120 TB local NVMe density, up to twice the vCPU and memory of prior generations, nine size options, and up to 100 Gbps networking with 60 Gbps EBS bandwidth.

Amazon RDS Adds R8gd and M8gd for Optimized Reads Now

🚀 Amazon RDS now supports R8gd and M8gd instances for Optimized Reads on Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL and RDS for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB, offering improved price-performance. Optimized Reads uses local NVMe-based SSDs to store ephemeral data (temporary tables and evicted pages) to reduce network I/O and boost read latency and throughput. AWS reports up to 165% better throughput and up to 120% better price-performance on R8gd versus R6g for Aurora PostgreSQL. These instances are available in select US, Europe, and Asia Pacific regions and can be enabled via the Console, CLI, or SDK.

AWS Transfer Family Terraform Module Adds Malware Scanning

🛡️ AWS has updated the Transfer Family Terraform module to support automated malware scanning workflows for files transferred to S3. The module provisions GuardDuty S3 Protection–based scan pipelines, dynamic routing based on results, and threat notifications in a single deployment. It preserves folder structure, allows granular S3 prefix targeting, and helps ensure only verified clean files reach applications and data lakes.

Amazon Polly adds five voices and three Asia Pacific regions

🎧 Amazon Polly now offers five new Generative TTS voices—Austrian German (Hannah), Irish English (Niamh), Brazilian Portuguese (Camila), Belgian Dutch (Lisa), and Korean (Seoyeon)—bringing the Generative engine to thirty-one voices across twenty locales. The Generative engine is generally available in three new Asia Pacific regions: Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and all Generative voices are now available in US East (N. Virginia), Europe (Frankfurt), and US West (Oregon). These updates expand Amazon Polly's managed text-to-speech capabilities for conversational AI and speech content creation.

Fortinet and CSI Launch Global Cybercrime Bounty Program

🛡️ Fortinet and Crime Stoppers International (CSI) have launched the Cybercrime Bounty program, a global initiative enabling secure, anonymous reporting of cybercriminal activity. Validated reports will feed Fortinet’s threat intelligence to support law enforcement investigations and potential prosecutions. The program scales deterrence by combining community-sourced tips with expert analysis, building on decades of Fortinet collaboration with INTERPOL and other public-private partners.

Cloudflare outage disrupts global network services

⚠️ Cloudflare is investigating an outage that has produced widespread 500 internal server errors and impacted its Dashboard and API, disrupting access to numerous customer websites and platforms. The company first reported support portal availability issues and then an incident at 11:48 UTC affecting the Cloudflare Global Network, with multiple European nodes observed offline. Downdetector logged tens of thousands of reports, and Cloudflare says it is working to mitigate the incident; partial recovery has been reported for Access and WARP while remediation continues for application services.

Snort3 Adds Severity-Based Rule Grouping for Flexibility

🔔 Cisco Talos has introduced a new Severity rule group for Snort3 in Cisco Secure Firewall, grouping detection rules by CVSS-derived severity tiers (low, medium, high, critical). Administrators can set coverage by time range — from the last two years up to all historical vulnerabilities — to balance detection depth and performance. This makes it easier to align rules with patch cycles, compliance needs, and organizational risk priorities while reducing manual tuning.

AWS launches Supplementary Packages for Amazon Linux

📦 AWS announced the general availability of Supplementary Packages for Amazon Linux (SPAL), a curated repository offering thousands of pre-built EPEL9-compatible packages for Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023). SPAL reduces the need to compile software from source, accelerating deployments and lowering operational overhead for developers, system administrators, and DevOps teams. Packages are derived from community EPEL9 sources with AWS applying security patches as they become available upstream. SPAL is available across all AWS Commercial Regions, including GovCloud and China.

Amazon Redshift JIT ANALYZE for Apache Iceberg tables

📈 Amazon Redshift now supports Just‑In‑Time (JIT) ANALYZE for Apache Iceberg tables, automatically collecting table‑ and column‑level statistics during query execution. The feature uses intelligent heuristics and lightweight sketch data structures to determine when runtime statistics will improve optimizer decisions and to build high‑quality statistics on the fly. JIT ANALYZE is generally available in all AWS regions with Redshift and requires no configuration changes to begin improving query plans and performance.

Active Threat Defense Now Default in AWS Network Firewall

🔒 Starting today, AWS Network Firewall enables active threat defense by default in alert mode when you create new firewall policies in the AWS Management Console. The feature provides automated, intelligence-driven visibility into ongoing threat activities and the indicator groups, types, and names you are protected against. You can switch to block mode to automatically prevent suspicious traffic or disable the feature entirely. AWS verifies threat indicators to reduce false positives and the capability is available in all Regions, including AWS GovCloud (US) and China.

Amazon MSK Replicator expands to Hyderabad and Malaysia

🔁 Amazon Web Services has expanded MSK Replicator to the Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) and Asia Pacific (Malaysia) Regions, enabling customers to replicate streaming data between Amazon MSK clusters. MSK Replicator automates asynchronous replication and preserves Kafka metadata such as topic configurations, ACLs, and consumer offsets, while automatically scaling underlying resources. The feature simplifies failover and regional resilience and is available from the MSK console or CLI.

Amazon FSx for Lustre: Up to 5× Faster Directory Listing

🚀 Amazon FSx for Lustre now delivers up to 5× faster directory listing performance, reducing the time it takes to run ls and inspect file system contents. The improvement benefits interactive use cases such as home directories and source code repositories commonly used by ML researchers, data scientists, and developers. These gains are provided via the Lustre 2.15 client in all FSx regions; upgrade to 2.15 and apply the recommended client tunings to realize the speedups.

Amazon Redshift Adds SUPER Type for Case-Insensitive DBs

🧩 Amazon Redshift now supports the SUPER data type in databases configured with case-insensitive collation, enabling analytics on semi-structured and nested data alongside structured SQL types. Using PartiQL, users can query JSON and mixed data without additional normalization. The COLLATE function lets you explicitly control case sensitivity for SUPER columns. This capability is available in all AWS Regions, including AWS GovCloud (US).