All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🛡️ Amazon Quick's agentic AI is now available in AWS GovCloud (US-West), bringing an AI teammate into an isolated, FedRAMP Class D (formerly High) authorized environment for government and regulated-industry teams. The service enables custom chat agents for mission workflows—such as procurement, ATO compliance, and grants management—while keeping data hosted and processed within the GovCloud region. Spaces enforce least-privilege access and Quick integrates with existing tools like Microsoft 365, SharePoint, and OneDrive via GCC High connectors.

🚀 Amazon EC2 R8a instances are now available in Canada (Central). These instances use 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors with up to 4.5 GHz and deliver up to 30% higher performance and up to 19% better price-performance versus R7a. Built on the AWS Nitro System with sixth generation Nitro Cards, R8a offers 12 sizes (including 2 bare metal) and is SAP-certified.

🔒 Landing Zone Accelerator now has an independent assessment report for C5:2020 available on AWS Artifact, evaluating how LZA's baseline implements nearly 200 native security controls. The report, prepared by AWS partner Schellman, maps LZA's Universal Configuration and security control baseline to C5:2020 technical criteria and describes architecture, best practices, and scoping considerations. LZA supports standard multi-account and container deployments in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud and is accompanied by a Compliance Workbook to help customers accelerate evidence collection and assessment preparation.

🔒 Amazon Bedrock now supports cost allocation by AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) principal — including IAM users and roles — for model inference requests made through the bedrock-mantle endpoint. This extends existing support for the bedrock-runtime endpoint and enables customers to attribute inference costs to teams, projects, or applications using IAM principal tags. Activate IAM principal tags in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console to analyze costs in AWS Cost Explorer or include caller identity data in AWS Cost and Usage Report 2.0.

🔒 Amazon Web Services (AWS) has published the Summer 2026 SOC 1 report covering 185 services for the period July 1, 2025–June 30, 2026. Customers can access the report via AWS Artifact in the AWS Management Console. AWS continues to expand the set of services within its compliance programs to support customer regulatory and architectural needs. Contact your AWS account team for questions or feedback.

🔒 Amazon Web Services announces it has completed the 2025-26 NHS Data Security and Protection Toolkit (DSPT) assessment, achieving a status of Standards Exceeded. The DSPT measures performance against the National Data Guardian’s 10 data security standards for organizations accessing NHS patient data. AWS’s assessment status is valid until June 30, 2027, and the compliance certificate is available via the NHS England website and AWS Artifact. AWS reiterates that security and compliance are a shared responsibility between the provider and the customer.

🧭 This announcement explains how Looker’s governed semantic layer now integrates with Gemini Enterprise, enabling analysts to publish conversational agents via the Agent-to-Agent protocol. The integration routes KPI requests to Looker agents that generate deterministic SQL, preserving version-controlled business logic and existing row- and column-level access controls. It uses a zero-risk pass-through architecture with one-time OAuth consent so Gemini does not ingest or persist enterprise data. Features include native interactive charts, interoperability with other agents, and identity-centric authentication to maintain governance while delivering secure, conversational analytics.

🚀 Gemini in Google Cloud's Database Migration Service streamlines conversion of stored procedures, triggers, and functions from proprietary dialects like PL/SQL and T-SQL into PostgreSQL PL/pgSQL. The service analyzes full schema context, provides side-by-side diffs and inline explanations, and enforces IAM-bound security. Teams can validate, edit, and deploy converted code within a single console to shorten migration timelines.

🔒 Google Cloud publishes an updated roadmap to migrate its infrastructure and services to post-quantum cryptography by 2029, addressing risks like Store Now, Decrypt Later and signature forgery. The plan prioritizes API endpoints, load balancers, Cloud KMS, and key management while collaborating on standards such as NIST and IETF. Google outlines domain-specific timelines through 2027–2028 and emphasizes shared responsibilities with customers for operational readiness.

🧭 AWS Glue now lets users open Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio with a single click from the Glue console, enabling analysts and engineers to query cataloged data, run data quality checks, and build pipelines without switching contexts. Access from S3 Tables, Athena, EMR, Redshift and Glue consoles is supported, and the same IAM role is used when launching SageMaker Notebooks. An inline permissions panel simplifies setup by letting you create and customize required IAM policies in-context if SageMaker Unified Studio isn't yet configured.

🔐 AWS Secrets Manager now supports managed external secrets for Jenkins API Tokens and SonarQube Tokens, enabling automatic rotation and lifecycle management directly from the AWS console. For Jenkins, Secrets Manager mints new tokens and revokes old ones only after verifying the replacement is active, supporting both self-rotation and admin-assisted rotation. SonarQube rotation covers User Tokens, Global Analysis Tokens, and Project Analysis Tokens via the SonarQube Web API, with user tokens supporting self-rotation and analysis tokens rotated using an admin token. These additions join other supported services and are available in all Regions where managed external secrets is supported.

🛡️ URL Scanning 2.0 expands VirusTotal's URL analysis with headless browser execution, producing full-page screenshots, DOM captures, network logs, and web-technology fingerprints. The update introduces historical pivoting so analysts can review point-in-time snapshots and track how a page's content and risk score evolved. Core telemetry is available to all users, with deeper retrospective data and infrastructure pivots reserved for Premium customers.

📊 Amazon Connect Customer now offers a performance dashboard for Cases that enables managers to monitor case volume, resolution trends, and SLA performance. The dashboard supports comparisons between current and prior periods across metrics such as cases created, average resolution time, first-contact resolution percentage, and SLA achievement rate. Managers can slice trends by case template, assigned user, or queue to identify issues and prioritize improvements.

📥 AWS Clean Rooms now supports exporting privacy-enhanced analysis logs for SQL analyses to an S3 bucket, giving customers improved optimization and troubleshooting capabilities. Collaboration owners can grant members permission to export logs when creating a collaboration or via change requests for existing collaborations. After a query runs, privacy-enhanced Spark execution details can be exported to a chosen S3 path to help identify issues like data skew and reduce resolution time and costs.

🔒 OpenAI has announced GPT‑5.6‑Cyber, a purpose-trained LLM for cybersecurity, and introduced two Daybreak tiers: Daybreak Blue for defensive tasks and Daybreak Red for advanced defensive and offensive testing. Daybreak Blue members get access to frontier models like GPT‑5.6 Sol with certain system-level safeguards removed for authorized defensive work, while Daybreak Red members can use purpose-trained cyber models such as GPT‑5.5‑Cyber and GPT‑5.6‑Cyber for advanced tasks. OpenAI says GPT‑5.6‑Cyber outperforms prior models on benchmarks and was used to find a high-severity V8 vulnerability that was responsibly disclosed and fixed.

🌐 Google announces the Americas Connect expansion with three new subsea cable systems — Alisios, Canoa, and OlaLuz — plus a new branch on Firmina. These routes will link the Dominican Republic, Panama, Chile, Bermuda, and Florida, enhancing capacity and resilience between Latin America, the Caribbean, the U.S. East and West Coasts, and Europe. The program complements prior investments in Curie, Nuvem, and Sol to strengthen regional connectivity.

🚀 Amazon RDS for MariaDB now supports the MariaDB 12.3 Long-Term Support release, starting with minor version 12.3.2. This update brings Oracle-compatible TO_DATE(), an IS JSON predicate for native JSON validation, and optimizer improvements for LEFT JOIN and RANGE partition scans. Upgrades can be performed via Blue/Green Deployments, in-place upgrades, or snapshot restore, and migrations are supported through AWS Database Migration Service.

🔔 Amazon SageMaker JumpStart now includes Black Forest Labs' FLUX.2-small-decoder and Google's gemma-4-12B-it, expanding foundation model options for AWS customers. FLUX.2-small-decoder offers faster image decoding with lower VRAM use, while gemma-4-12B-it provides unified multimodal understanding across text, image, and audio. Customers can deploy these models via the SageMaker console or the SageMaker Python SDK for scalable AI solutions.

🆕 Amazon SageMaker JumpStart now offers three foundation models: Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 FP8, NVIDIA’s Nemotron-Nano-12B-v2, and Z.ai’s GLM-OCR. These models cover long-horizon agentic engineering, efficient hybrid reasoning, and advanced document understanding, enabling customers to deploy high-performance AI on AWS with minimal setup. Each model is optimized for specific enterprise workflows and can be deployed via the SageMaker console or SDK.

🔷 Amazon EC2 High Memory U7in-24TB (u7in-24tb.224xlarge) instances are now available in the AWS South America (São Paulo) region. These U7i instances are part of the AWS 7th generation and are powered by custom 4th-generation Intel Xeon Scalable (Sapphire Rapids) processors. They provide 24 TiB DDR5 memory, 896 vCPUs, up to 200 Gbps networking and 100 Gbps EBS bandwidth, and support ENA Express. U7i instances target mission-critical in-memory databases such as SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL Server.