All news in category "Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch"

DOT Adopts Google Workspace with Gemini Agency-wide

🔒 The U.S. Department of Transportation has moved its workforce to Google Workspace with Gemini, becoming the first cabinet-level agency to transition away from legacy providers under the GSA OneGov Strategy. More than 12,000 users are already on Workspace, with roughly 40,000 additional employees slated to migrate in 2026. The deployment integrated NotebookLM, Chrome Enterprise Premium, and Workspace Enterprise Plus with Assured Controls Plus, and the foundational system was delivered in just 22 days. DOT emphasizes FedRAMP High authorization, 100% U.S.-based support, and AI-enabled workflows to strengthen security, collaboration, and operational efficiency.

Cloudflare outage causes websites to return 500 errors

🚨 Cloudflare is experiencing an outage that is causing many websites to return an 500 Internal Server Error. The fault appears to be server-side and affects requests routed through Cloudflare, so users see an error page instead of normal content. Engineers at the provider are investigating the root cause and working to restore normal operations. This remains a developing situation and impacted sites may be unavailable until services are recovered.

Amazon Q Adds Analysis Support for Amazon SES Email Sending

🔍 Amazon Q now analyzes email sending in Amazon SES, enabling customers to ask natural-language questions about SES resource configuration, usage patterns, and deliverability issues. Q evaluates usage data and resource settings to surface optimization opportunities and troubleshooting steps, reducing the need for deep email-sending expertise. Support is available in all Regions where SES and Q are offered.

Elastic Beanstalk Adds Python 3.14 Support on AL2023

🐍 AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports Python 3.14 on Amazon Linux 2023, allowing developers to build and deploy applications that take advantage of the latest interpreter features, improved error messages, and updated security and API behavior. The platform update also enhances the interactive interpreter experience and aligns runtime behavior with modern Python improvements. Environments can be provisioned via the Elastic Beanstalk Console, CLI, or API, and are available in all commercial AWS Regions including AWS GovCloud (US).

AWS simplifies CloudTrail events ingestion into CloudWatch

🔔 AWS now enables centralized collection of CloudTrail events in Amazon CloudWatch, allowing organizations to consolidate telemetry alongside VPC Flow Logs and EKS Control Plane Logs. The integration leverages service-linked channels (SLCs) to receive events without requiring trails and adds safety checks plus termination protection. Customers will incur CloudTrail event delivery charges and CloudWatch Logs ingestion fees based on custom logs pricing; consult the CloudWatch documentation for supported regions and enablement steps.

AWS Directory Service Managed Microsoft AD Now in NZ

📢 AWS has announced that AWS Managed Microsoft AD and AD Connector are now available in the Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region. AWS Managed Microsoft AD is built on actual Microsoft Active Directory and helps reduce the operational burden of running AD infrastructure in AWS while enabling domain join for EC2, containers, and Kubernetes. AD Connector acts as a proxy to let AWS services use existing on-premises AD identities and group policies without provisioning AD in the cloud.

Cloudflare outage on Dec 5, 2025 caused by WAF change

⚠️ On December 5, 2025 a configuration change to Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall (WAF) triggered an error in a subset of proxies, causing HTTP 500 responses for affected customers. The change — increasing WAF request-body buffering to mitigate CVE-2025-55182 — was rolled out gradually, but a separate global configuration update disabled an internal tool and propagated immediately. That global change caused a Lua runtime nil lookup in the older FL1 proxy when a killswitch skipped an execute action in a ruleset; the change was reverted within 25 minutes and the incident was not caused by malicious activity.

Dataplex Data Products: Curated Assets for Enterprise

🔍 Google Cloud has introduced data products in Dataplex Universal Catalog (preview), packaging curated data assets, documentation, and governance controls into purpose-built units aligned to business use cases. These data products let producers declare quality, freshness, ownership, and contractual guarantees while grouping assets to simplify access and reduce operational toil. Consumers can discover, request access, and rely on documented lineage and context to accelerate analytics. Google also positions data products as foundational inputs to more reliable AI and agent-driven workflows.

Four Immediate Cybersecurity Priorities for Organizations

🔒 In this Deputy CISO blog, Damon Becknel, Microsoft’s VP and Deputy CISO for Regulated Industries, outlines four immediate priorities organizations should act on now. He emphasizes reinforcing essential cyber hygiene—accurate asset inventories, network segmentation, timely patching, MFA, EDR, and proxying email and web traffic—as the most effective means to reduce common intrusions. Becknel also urges adoption of modern standards like phishing-resistant MFA, secure DNS and DMARC, deployment of fingerprinting to track bad actors, and active cross-industry collaboration to share threat signals and raise the cost of attack.

NVIDIA Run:ai Model Streamer Adds Cloud Storage Support

🚀 The NVIDIA Run:ai Model Streamer now supports native Google Cloud Storage access, accelerating model load and inference startup for vLLM workloads on GKE. By streaming tensors directly from Cloud Storage into GPU memory and using distributed, NVLink-aware transfers, the streamer dramatically reduces cold-start latency and idle GPU time. Enabling it in vLLM is a single-flag change and it can leverage GKE Workload Identity for secure, keyless access.

Replit and Google Cloud Expand Vibe Coding for Enterprise

🚀 Replit and Google Cloud have expanded a strategic, multi‑year partnership to bring vibe coding capabilities to enterprise developers and teams. Replit will continue to run on Google Cloud infrastructure—leveraging Cloud Run, Google Kubernetes Engine, BigQuery, and Vertex AI—and now supports Google models including Gemini 3, 2.5 Flash Lite, 2.5 Flash, and Imagen 4 to power coding and multimodal workflows. The agreement also includes joint go‑to‑market and co‑sell initiatives to accelerate adoption across enterprise customers.

AI Security and Elevated Zero Trust for Hybrid Networks

🔒 Check Point's new Quantum Firewall Software release, R82.10, extends a prevention-first security model across CloudGuard Network and Quantum Force Firewalls. The update unifies management, strengthens Zero Trust controls for hybrid mesh environments, and adds enforcement and telemetry designed to protect MCP servers, AI workloads, cloud assets and on-prem systems. It simplifies policy consistency and supports responsible AI adoption through data-aware controls and centralized governance.

Securing the AI Frontier: GSA OneGov Accelerates Secure AI

🔒 Palo Alto Networks explains why the GSA OneGov agreement matters for federal AI adoption and cybersecurity. Author Eric Trexler cites Unit 42 research showing new risks—particularly AI Agent Smuggling via indirect prompt injection and agent session smuggling—and argues AI must be defended as an attack surface. The post highlights platform protections including Prisma AIRS, FedRAMP High CNAPP, and Prisma SASE to secure AI workloads, edge users, and data. It positions OneGov as a procurement shortcut for agencies to deploy AI securely and notes promotional offers through 31 January 2028.

Public Sector Agentic Era: 300 Agents in One Day Showcase

🤖 Google Public Sector ran a #100DaysOfAgents campaign and an interactive Mission District at its October 29, 2025 Public Sector Summit where attendees built 300+ AI agent prototypes using self-serve builder stations. The initiative demonstrates how AI agents can accelerate mission outcomes by automating complex tasks, breaking down data silos, and improving access to services. Prototype examples ranged from a Grid Optimization Analyst to a Water System Transition Planner and an NIH Access Assistant; agents in the library are illustrative, not production-ready. Google invites agencies to partner with experts, prototype with Gemini for Government, and continue development at Google Cloud Next.

Microsoft bug in Microsoft 365 licensing blocks downloads

⚠️ Microsoft is investigating a known issue that prevents customers from downloading Microsoft 365 desktop apps from the Microsoft 365 homepage, with failures reported since November 2. The company says a recent service update introduced a code defect affecting the license check process, and it has tagged the situation as an incident. A fix has been developed and is being validated in Microsoft's internal environment, and the company promised an update on deployment timing by 6:30 PM UTC. Microsoft is also addressing a separate issue causing some users to be unable to open Excel attachments in the new Outlook client due to filename encoding errors.

PubMed Data in BigQuery to Accelerate Medical Research

🔬 Google Cloud has made PubMed content available as a BigQuery public dataset with integrated vector search via Vertex AI, enabling semantic search across more than 35 million biomedical articles. Both BigQuery and Vertex AI Vector Search are FedRAMP High authorized, allowing organizations to run embedding models and VECTOR_SEARCH queries inside BigQuery. Early adopters like The Princess Máxima Center report literature reviews reduced from hours to minutes, and example SQL plus a demo repo are provided to help teams get started.

CISA Launches Industry Engagement Platform to Innovate

🛡️ CISA launched the Industry Engagement Platform (IEP) to create a structured, two-way channel between the agency and companies, researchers, and academia to present emerging cybersecurity and infrastructure technologies. The platform lets organizations build customizable technology profiles and upload capability overviews to connect with the right CISA subject-matter experts. Participation does not confer preferential contract consideration, but informs CISA market research and mission needs.

Amazon Bedrock Adds OpenAI-Compatible Responses API

🚀 Amazon Bedrock now exposes an OpenAI-compatible Responses API on new service endpoints, enabling asynchronous inference for long-running workloads, streaming and non-streaming modes, and automatic stateful conversation reconstruction so developers no longer must resend full histories. The endpoints provide Chat Completions with reasoning-effort support for models served by Mantle, Amazon’s distributed inference engine. Integration requires only a base URL change for OpenAI SDK–compatible code, and support starts today for OpenAI’s GPT OSS 20B and 120B models, with additional models coming soon.

AWS previews EC2 M9g instances powered by Graviton5

🚀 Amazon Web Services today previewed new Amazon EC2 M9g instances powered by AWS Graviton5 processors. AWS says M9g delivers up to 25% better compute performance and increased networking and EBS bandwidth versus Graviton4-based M8g, with up to 30–35% faster performance for databases, web applications, and machine learning. Built on the AWS Nitro System, M9g targets application servers, microservices, gaming servers, midsize data stores, and caching fleets, and is available in preview through a request process.

Designing for GKE's Flat Network: Practical Recommendations

🔍 This post previews Google's new design recommendation for leveraging GKE's flat network, explaining how it differs from island-mode networking and how teams can adapt existing architectures. It highlights recommended patterns and a reference design that emulates island-mode behavior within the flat model. The guidance focuses on IP address management, scalability, and integration points to ease migration for critical workloads such as generative AI.