All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔍 ODOT teamed with Google Cloud and North Highland to centralize decades of bridge inspection, location, and maintenance data into BigQuery and govern it with Dataplex, creating a single trusted source for analysis. Non-technical and technical staff can query complex datasets conversationally through Gemini in Looker, while BigQuery ML powers predictive models to flag at-risk bridges ahead of failures. Secure sharing via Analytics Hub and unified governance enables better resource allocation, improved safety, and faster, data-driven decisions across the agency.

🔐 Team-wide VMware certification acts as a force multiplier for security, operations, and talent retention. Certified teams share a common language around architecture, reduce misconfigurations, and respond to incidents faster. Expertise in vSphere, NSX, vSAN, and cloud foundations teaches not just deployment but secure, scalable configuration. Programs like VMUG Advantage make broad certification practical with labs, exam vouchers, and personal-use licenses.

🌐 AWS Storage Gateway now supports IPv6 for endpoints, APIs, and gateway appliance interfaces, offering new dual‑stack access alongside IPv4. Existing IPv4-only endpoints remain available for backward compatibility. Customers can standardize on IPv6 or transition gradually using the dual‑stack appliances and APIs. Support is available in all AWS Regions where the service is offered.

🚀 Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Limitless Database is now available in AWS GovCloud (US‑East, US‑West), providing a serverless endpoint that transparently distributes data and queries across multiple Aurora Serverless instances while preserving transactional consistency. The service supports PostgreSQL 16.6, 16.8, and 16.9 compatibility and includes distributed query planning and transaction management so you don’t need to build custom sharding or manage multiple databases. Compute automatically scales up and down within customer-specified budgets, reducing the need to provision for peak capacity.

🔒 Amazon S3 now supports conditional deletes in S3 general purpose buckets. You can include an HTTP If-Match header with an object's ETag when calling DeleteObject or DeleteObjects; S3 will only delete the object if the provided ETag matches, reducing accidental removals in high-concurrency, multi-writer environments. Administrators can also enforce conditional deletes using the s3:if-match bucket policy condition. The capability is available at no additional cost in all AWS Regions and accessible via the API, SDKs, and CLI.

🔒 Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is now Nutanix Ready validated with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure 7.3, delivering integrated network security for Nutanix environments. The update leverages Nutanix Flow Network Security features—entity groups, vNIC-specific policies, and global policy scopes—to extend microsegmentation and policy consistency. Customers can deploy CloudGuard via native Service Insertion and firewall chaining, enabling protection with minimal operational overhead.

🤖 Google introduced the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), an open standard developed with more than 60 payments and technology firms to enable secure, agent-initiated transactions across platforms. AP2 extends A2A and MCP, using cryptographically-signed Mandates and verifiable credentials to prove authorization, ensure authenticity, and provide a non-repudiable audit trail. The protocol supports cards, real-time bank transfers, and crypto.

📢 At FabCon Vienna, Microsoft unveiled a broad set of Microsoft Fabric enhancements to accelerate data-rich agents and enterprise adoption. Key updates include expanded OneLake shortcuts and mirroring (preview for Oracle and BigQuery), a preview Graph database and Maps for geospatial context, developer tooling (MCP, Extensibility Toolkit, CI/CD) and strengthened security controls like Azure Private Link and customer-managed keys. These features focus on zero-copy data access, governance, and operational scalability for mission-critical workloads.

🔒 Senator Ron Wyden has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Microsoft for its continued use of the RC4 encryption algorithm. The letter highlights a technique called Kerberoasting, which exploits Kerberos ticket encryption to extract service account credentials. The complaint raises concerns about lingering support for weak ciphers in enterprise authentication.

📘 Google Cloud has published a new ebook, A Practical Guide to Data Science with Google Cloud, aimed at practitioners adopting an AI-first approach across BigQuery, Vertex AI, and Serverless for Apache Spark. The guide emphasizes unified, streamlined workflows enabled by a central notebook experience that blends SQL, Python, and Spark and includes assistive features in Colab Enterprise to generate multi-step plans and code. It explains how a unified data foundation lets teams manage structured and unstructured data together and use familiar SQL to process documents and images. The ebook also offers real-world use cases with linked notebooks so practitioners can run the examples and accelerate delivery.

🚀 Google Cloud and SAP announced tighter integration to unify enterprise data and accelerate intelligent automation. SAP Business Data Cloud now connects to BigQuery via Datasphere, enabling bidirectional replication and AI-ready analytics. Procurement is simplified on the Google Cloud Marketplace with SAP BTP. New agent tooling—Agentspace, the Agent Development Kit, A2A and MCP standards—and expanded M4 memory-optimized VMs certified for SAP HANA aim to speed deployments, improve data consistency, and enable autonomous process automation.

🚀 Today Google announced 14 startups selected for the Google for Startups Accelerator: AI First program serving the Middle East, North Africa, and Turkey. The cohort addresses challenges across finance, real estate, healthcare, industrial safety, TradeTech, and education, and will receive targeted mentorship, technical training, and product and business support. Participants include Abwab.ai, COGNNA, Distichain, xBites, and Navatech, and the program emphasizes responsible AI to accelerate regional scaling and commercialization.

🚀 AWS today expanded availability of EC2 R8i and R8i‑flex instances to Asia Pacific (Malaysia, Singapore) and Europe (Frankfurt). These instances use custom Intel Xeon 6 processors exclusive to AWS and deliver up to 15% better price‑performance and 2.5× more memory bandwidth versus prior Intel‑based generations. R8i targets large, memory‑intensive workloads with 13 sizes (including two bare‑metal and a new 96xlarge) and SAP certification at 142,100 aSAPS, while R8i‑flex offers common memory‑optimized sizes from large to 16xlarge for cost-efficient right‑sizing.

🚀 AWS announced that AWS Transfer Family is now available in the Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region, supporting SFTP, FTP, FTPS and AS2 for managed file transfers. The service delivers fully managed ingress and egress to Amazon S3 and Amazon EFS, and integrates with event-driven automation to streamline file-processing workflows. This regional availability helps customers modernize and migrate business-to-business file exchanges to AWS while reducing operational overhead.

🚀 The CrowdStrike Falcon fall release reframes the platform as an Agentic Security Platform, introducing four core innovations: Enterprise Graph, Charlotte AI AgentWorks, the Agent Collaboration framework (powered by MCP), and an AI-native console. Enterprise Graph unifies telemetry into a real-time, AI-ready data layer to give humans and agents shared context. Charlotte AI AgentWorks delivers a no-code environment to design, test, deploy, and govern mission-specific security agents at scale, while MCP enables secure, orchestrated multi-agent collaboration.

⚡ OpenSearch introduces the Star-Tree Index, an opt-in index type that pre-aggregates data at ingestion to enable sub-second responses for frequent high-cardinality and multi-dimensional aggregations such as terms, histogram, and range. The feature is designed for real-time analytics and requires no query syntax changes; OpenSearch automatically routes supported queries to the optimized path. Early benchmarks indicate markedly faster aggregation performance on large datasets with minimal impact to ingestion throughput. Available in regions that support OpenSearch 3.1 and enabled at index creation via composite index settings.

🔧 Amazon OpenSearch Service announced support for Derived Source, an opt-in feature that lets you omit persisting the document _source and reconstruct it dynamically when needed. The capability, available with OpenSearch 3.1, reduces domain storage by skipping stored _source fields while still supporting search, get, mget, reindex, and update operations. Enable Derived Source at index creation using composite index settings.

📦 Amazon S3 Batch Operations now allows users to target all objects within an S3 bucket, or refine selection by prefix, suffix, creation date, or storage class directly from the AWS Management Console. Instead of providing a manifest, customers can specify these filters when creating a job and S3 will apply the chosen operation to every matching object and produce a detailed completion report. Typical use cases include copying between buckets, restoring archived data from Glacier classes, and computing checksums for datasets. The capability is available in all AWS Regions and can also be accessed via the AWS CLI or SDK.

🔐 Amazon GuardDuty centralizes continuous threat detection across AWS using AI/ML and integrated threat intelligence. It offers optional protection plans—S3, EKS, Runtime Monitoring, Malware Protection for EC2 and S3, RDS, and Lambda—that extend detections to service-specific telemetry and runtime behaviors. Built-in Extended Threat Detection correlates signals into high-confidence attack sequences and maps findings to MITRE ATT&CK, providing prioritized remediation guidance.

🩺 Amazon announces general availability of the SageMaker HyperPod health monitoring agent for Slurm clusters. The agent runs continuously on GPU- and Trainium-based nodes to perform passive background checks, detect hardware faults (for example, unresponsive GPUs and NVLink errors), and mark and replace unhealthy nodes automatically. It supports automatic reboots and coordinates with Slurm job auto-resume so training can continue from the last checkpoint, reducing manual intervention and downtime.