All news in category "Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch"

Chrome to revoke notification access for inactive sites

🔕 Google is updating Chrome to automatically revoke website notification permissions for sites that haven't been visited recently on both desktop and Android. The feature targets sites that send a high volume of notifications while receiving very low user engagement — Google found under 1% of alerts generate interactions. Chrome will notify users when a permission is removed and makes it easy to restore access via Safety Check or by revisiting the site and opting back in. Users who prefer to keep persistent notifications can disable the automatic revocation entirely.

Apple Raises Zero-Click Bug Bounty to $2M in Program

🔒 Apple has expanded and redesigned its bug bounty program, doubling the top reward to $2 million for zero-click remote compromise reports and enabling bonus payouts that can push awards above $5 million. The new payout tiers raise rewards across multiple attack categories and add a $1,000 encouragement award for low-impact findings. Apple broadened the wireless-proximity category to include C1/C1X and N1 chips and plans to distribute 1,000 secured iPhone 17 devices in 2026.

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Adds R8g Instances in New Regions

⚡ Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL now supports Graviton4-based R8g DB instances in AWS Canada (Central), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Seoul). R8g offers larger sizes up to 48xlarge with an 8:1 memory-to-vCPU ratio and DDR5 memory, including new 24xlarge and 48xlarge options delivering up to 192 vCPUs, up to 50 Gbps networking, and up to 40 Gbps EBS bandwidth. AWS reports up to 40% performance and up to 29% price/performance improvements over Graviton3 equivalents, varying by engine, version, and workload. You can launch or upgrade instances through the Amazon RDS console or AWS CLI with a simple instance type modification.

Google Cloud launches Network Security Learning Path

🔒 Google Cloud has launched a Network Security Learning Path culminating in the Designing Network Security in Google Cloud skill badge to help organizations secure dynamic cloud networks. The program covers design, build, and management of secure VPCs, GKE lockdown, NGFW rules, Cloud VPN/Interconnect, and Cloud Armor for WAF and DDoS protection. Learners validate skills through a hands-on break-fix challenge lab simulating incidents like firewall policy breaches and data exfiltration.

Navigating Public Sector Cybersecurity: AI and Zero Trust

🔒 As CSO for Google Public Sector, the post frames an urgency-driven approach to modern government security, emphasizing AI-powered threat detection, Zero Trust engineering, and a shared responsibility model. It highlights how Google Security Operations (FedRAMP High), fused threat intelligence from VirusTotal and Mandiant, and fast incident response strengthen mission continuity. The piece stresses that legacy defenses are insufficient against AI-enhanced adversaries and calls for proactive, intelligence-led modernization.

Amazon Connect adds copy and bulk edit for agent scheduling

🔁 Amazon Connect now supports copy and bulk edit for agent scheduling configuration, making it faster to create and maintain schedules. Administrators can copy existing scheduling configurations—such as a weekday shift profile to create a weekend variant—or clone a full schedule from one agent to multiple new hires. Bulk edits allow selective updates to fields like time zone and start date without altering weekly working hours, reducing manager time spent on configuration and improving operational efficiency.

Amazon Connect adds agent schedule adherence alerts

🔔 Amazon Connect now supports agent schedule adherence notifications, enabling supervisors to receive automated alerts by email or text (via EventBridge) when agents fall outside defined adherence thresholds. You can create rules—such as alerting when adherence drops below 85% in a trailing 15‑minute window—to notify supervisors proactively. These automated notifications remove the need for constant dashboard monitoring and help teams intervene before service levels decline.

Copilot on Windows Adds Email Connectors and Office Export

🖥️ Microsoft has updated Copilot on Windows to let users link Outlook and Gmail accounts, plus Google Drive, Calendar, and Contacts, and to generate and export Office files directly from prompts. The change is rolling out to Windows Insiders via the Microsoft Store for devices running Copilot version 1.25095.161.0 or later and must be enabled manually in the app's Connectors settings. Responses longer than 600 characters now include an export button to save content as Word, PowerPoint, Excel, or PDF files. Microsoft asked testers to provide feedback from within the Copilot app.

How VMware Certification Helped Advance a Tech Career

🎓Certification gave Matt Heldstab a clear framework and the confidence to tackle complex virtualization and multi-cloud challenges. Preparing for VCP certifications and VMware Cloud Foundation exams taught him architecture best practices, troubleshooting patterns, and how to communicate effectively with leadership. Hands-on lab work and community engagement—especially through VMUG—accelerated his development and enabled him to lead projects and speak publicly. He frames certification as a mindset shift from reactive operator to strategic architect.

Google Launches AI Vulnerability Reward Program for AI

🔒 Google has launched an AI Vulnerability Reward Program (AI VRP) offering base rewards up to $20,000 and up to $30,000 with multipliers for validated AI-product bugs. The program moves AI-related reports from the Abuse VRP into a dedicated stream to simplify submissions and unify reward assessment. In-scope products include Search, Gemini apps and Workspace, and qualifying issues cover data exfiltration, phishing enablement and model theft. Content-focused prompt injections and jailbreaks remain out of scope and should be reported via in-product tools.

it-sa Highlights: Vendor Security and Access Solutions

🔒 At it-sa vendors unveiled a slate of security, privacy and access offerings aimed at strengthening enterprise controls. Salesforce expanded its AI Agentforce into the Security Center and Privacy Center to automate threat detection, incident remediation and compliance prioritization. Ivanti reengineered Connect Secure 25.x with a security‑by‑design architecture including SELinux, WAF, secure boot and disk encryption. Additional launches included Samsung Knox mobile credentials, KOBIL mPower and a Zurich/Deutsche Telekom cyber insurance plus MDR integration.

Amazon Neptune Analytics Launched in Two New Regions

🚀 Amazon has made Neptune Analytics available in the AWS Canada (Central) and Australia (Sydney) Regions, enabling local creation and management of analytics graphs. Neptune Analytics is a memory‑optimized graph engine that supports fast, in‑memory processing, a library of optimized analytic algorithms, low‑latency graph queries, and vector similarity search within traversals. You can ingest data from an Amazon Neptune Database, snapshots, or Amazon S3, and start via the AWS Console or CLI; consult the Neptune pricing page and AWS Region Table for costs and availability.

Amazon EBS io2 Block Express Now Available in China Regions

🔔 Amazon EBS io2 Block Express is now available in AWS China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet, and China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. The service delivers consistent sub-millisecond latency and 99.999% durability with single-volume limits of 256,000 IOPS, 4 GiB/s throughput, and up to 64 TiB capacity. Volumes support multi-attach within an Availability Zone with NVMe reservations for shared storage fencing. Existing io1 users can nondisruptively upgrade via the ModifyVolume API to gain higher performance, durability, and improved cost-efficiency.

CrowdStrike Named Visionary in 2025 Gartner SIEM Placement

🔍 CrowdStrike Falcon Next‑Gen SIEM has been named a Visionary in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Security Information and Event Management. The product is presented as an agentic SOC engine that combines AI-driven detections, real-time telemetry and a unified data foundation to accelerate detection and response. CrowdStrike cites metrics including 150x faster search, over 1PB/day ingestion and up to 80% cost savings, and highlights the acquisition of Onum to improve real-time pipelines and scale. New AI agents for workflow, data transformation, search analysis and correlation rule generation aim to simplify playbook creation, data prep and detection tuning.

Amazon Quick Suite: Agentic AI Workspace for Business

🤖 Amazon Quick Suite is now generally available as an agentic, AI-powered workspace that retrieves insights across the public internet and your enterprise data stores — including Slack, Salesforce, Snowflake, databases, and other documents — and moves instantly from answers to actions. Quick Suite can execute or trigger tasks in popular applications like Salesforce, Jira, and ServiceNow, and automate workflows from RFP responses to invoice processing and account reconciliation. AWS highlights customer privacy — queries and data are not used to train models — and administrators can enable and tailor the experience quickly; new customers receive a 30-day trial for up to 25 users.

AWS Direct Connect Adds 10G/100G with MACsec in KC

🔒 AWS expanded 10 Gbps and 100 Gbps dedicated Direct Connect links with MACsec encryption at the Netrality KC1 facility near Kansas City, MO. Customers at this location can now establish private, direct network access to all public AWS Regions (except China), AWS GovCloud Regions, and AWS Local Zones. Direct Connect delivers a private, physical connection that can provide more consistent performance and lower latency than the public internet. AWS also notes there are over 146 Direct Connect locations worldwide.

Microsoft Azure Debuts Large-Scale NVIDIA GB300 Cluster

🚀 Microsoft Azure announced the first production-scale cluster using more than 4,600 NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 (Blackwell Ultra) GPUs, co-engineered with NVIDIA to support OpenAI and other frontier AI workloads. The new ND GB300 v6 VMs are optimized for reasoning models, agentic systems, and multimodal generative AI, delivered on rack-scale systems with 72 GPUs per rack and 36 NVIDIA Grace CPUs. Microsoft says this infrastructure will shorten training from months to weeks and will scale to hundreds of thousands of Blackwell Ultra GPUs globally.

Amazon EC2 I7i Storage-Optimized Instances Available in Spain

🖥️ Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched Amazon EC2 I7i storage-optimized instances in the AWS Europe (Spain) region, powered by 5th-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and 3rd-generation AWS Nitro SSDs. Compared with prior I4i instances, I7i delivers up to 23% better compute performance, improved price performance, and up to 45 TB of NVMe storage with notable reductions in storage I/O latency and variability. Offered in eleven sizes (including bare-metal), I7i targets I/O-intensive, latency-sensitive workloads requiring very high random IOPS and real-time access to multi-TB datasets.

Fortinet Named Gartner Customers’ Choice for WAAP 2025

🔒 Fortinet has been named a Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Cloud WAAP in 2025, reflecting verified customer satisfaction with a 4.8/5 rating and a 99% recommendation rate across 79 reviews. The accolade highlights FortiAppSec Cloud, a unified WAAP platform that integrates WAF, API protection, bot management, DDoS mitigation, CDN acceleration, and AI-driven automation. Customers emphasize rapid onboarding, reliable performance, and strong vendor support.

Google Introduces Gemini Enterprise for the Workplace

🚀 Gemini Enterprise is presented as Google’s unified, enterprise-grade AI front door that integrates advanced models, a no-code workbench, pre-built and customizable agents, secure data connectors, centralized governance, and an open partner ecosystem. The chat-first interface works across Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 and adds multimodal agents for text, image, video, and speech. Google highlights developer tooling, open agent protocols, agent monetization, and customer deployments to accelerate end-to-end workflow automation and auditable governance.