All news in category "Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch"

Microsoft Copilot adds App Builder and Workflows agents

🤖 Microsoft introduced two new Microsoft 365 Copilot agents, App Builder and Workflows, to help employees create apps and automate tasks using their Microsoft 365 data. Users can describe requirements in natural language and Copilot will generate interactive elements or automated flows across Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Planner and other services. Outputs are integrated with the Copilot experience and protected by enterprise-grade security and role-based access controls. App Builder will be added to the Agent Store this week, while Workflows is already available to customers enrolled in the Frontier program.

Securing the AI Factory: Palo Alto Networks and NVIDIA

🔒 Palo Alto Networks outlines a platform-centric approach to protect the enterprise AI Factory, announcing integration of Prisma AIRS with NVIDIA BlueField DPUs. The collaboration embeds distributed zero-trust security directly into infrastructure, delivering agentless, penalty-free runtime protection and real-time workload threat detection. Validated on NVIDIA RTX PRO Server and optimized for BlueField‑3, with BlueField‑4 forthcoming, the solution ties into Strata Cloud Manager and Cortex for end-to-end visibility and control, aiming to secure AI operations at scale without compromising performance.

Chrome to Enable Always Use Secure Connections by Default

🔒 Google will enable Always Use Secure Connections by default in Chrome 154 (October 2026), prompting users before the first access to any public site that lacks HTTPS. The browser will attempt HTTPS for every connection and show a bypassable warning when HTTPS is unavailable, while suppressing repeated warnings for frequently visited sites. A public-sites-only variant excludes private/local names to reduce noise and will roll out earlier to Enhanced Safe Browsing users. Administrators can disable the setting and Google provides migration guidance.

Chrome to warn before opening insecure HTTP sites in 2026

🔒 Google will enable Always Use Secure Connections by default in Chrome 154 (October 2026), prompting users before the first access to any public site that uses HTTP. This change promotes the existing opt-in HTTPS-First Mode to a default setting to better protect users from man-in-the-middle attacks and content tampering. Chrome will avoid repeated alerts for frequently visited insecure sites and offers options to restrict warnings to public sites or to include private intranets. Before the full rollout, Chrome 147 (April 2026) will enable the setting for over 1 billion users with Enhanced Safe Browsing to help identify sites that need migration.

GitHub Agent HQ: Native, Open Ecosystem & Controls

🚀 GitHub introduced Agent HQ, a native platform that centralizes AI agents within the GitHub workflow. The initiative will bring partner coding agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Cognition, and xAI into Copilot subscriptions and VS Code. A unified "mission control" offers a consistent command center across GitHub, VS Code, mobile, and the CLI. Enterprise-grade controls, code quality tooling, and a Copilot metrics dashboard provide governance and visibility for teams.

GitHub Agent HQ: Native AI Agents and Governance Launch

🤖 Agent HQ integrates AI agents directly into the GitHub workflow, making third-party coding assistants available through paid Copilot subscriptions. It introduces a cross-surface mission control to assign, steer, and track agents from GitHub, VS Code, mobile, and the CLI. VS Code additions include Plan Mode, AGENTS.md for custom agent rules, and an MCP Registry to discover partner servers. Enterprise features add governance, audit logging, branch CI controls, and a Copilot metrics dashboard.

Integrating Oracle with Google Cloud for AI Automation

🔁 This Google Cloud post explains how enterprises can integrate Oracle Database with cloud-native analytics and AI by moving transactional data into BigQuery. It recommends ingestion patterns such as low-latency Change Data Capture via Datastream, batch staging to Cloud Storage, and notes ODBC/JDBC for interactive queries but not continuous replication. Once data resides in BigQuery, organizations can leverage Gemini-powered features, BigQuery ML, and AI agents (via the Agent Developer Kit) for natural-language exploration, assisted coding, multimodal analysis, and automated workflows across retail and education use cases.

Agent Factory Recap: AI Agents for Data Engineering

🔍 The episode of The Agent Factory reviewed practical AI agents for data engineering and data science, highlighting demos that combine Gemini, BigQuery, Colab Enterprise, and Spanner-based graph queries. It showcased a BigQuery Data Engineering Agent that generates pipelines, time dimensions, and data-quality assertions from SQL, and a Data Science Agent that runs end-to-end anomaly detection in Colab. The post also covered CodeMender for autonomous code security fixes and a creative Spanner+ADK comic demo illustrating multi-region concepts.

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams: Record Size Raised to 10MiB

📣 Amazon Web Services has increased the maximum record size for Kinesis Data Streams from 1MiB to 10MiB and doubled the maximum PutRecords request size to 10MiB. You can update a stream's maximum record size to 10MiB via the AWS Management Console or the UpdateMaxRecordSize API using the AWS SDK or CLI, and continue using existing Kinesis APIs to publish and consume larger records. AWS Lambda now supports Kinesis payloads up to 6MiB; there are no additional charges beyond standard Kinesis fees. The feature is available in supported regions and AWS provides documentation describing region coverage and downstream handling guidance.

AWS EC2 Im4gn Instances Available Now in Milan Region

🚀 Amazon EC2 Im4gn instances are now available in Europe (Milan). Built on the AWS Nitro System and powered by Graviton2 processors, these instances provide up to 30 TB of 2nd Generation Nitro SSD local instance storage for I/O‑intensive workloads. They deliver high compute performance, up to 100 Gbps networking, and Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) support for demanding database, search, and analytics use cases. Get started via the AWS Management Console, CLI, or SDKs.

AWS Offers EC2 I7i Storage-Optimized Instances in GovCloud

🚀 Amazon Web Services has made EC2 I7i storage-optimized instances available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East, US-West) Regions. These instances use 5th-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and 3rd-generation AWS Nitro SSDs to deliver up to 23% better compute performance and more than 10% better price performance versus prior I4i instances, along with up to 45 TB of NVMe local storage. I7i is offered in eleven sizes (nine virtual up to 48xlarge and two bare metal) with up to 100 Gbps network and 60 Gbps EBS bandwidth, and supports torn write prevention up to 16KB to reduce database bottlenecks for I/O-intensive, latency-sensitive workloads.

AI-Powered, Quantum-Ready Network Security Platform

🔒 Palo Alto Networks presents a unified, AI-driven approach to network security that consolidates browser, AI, and quantum defenses into the Strata Network Security Platform. New offerings include Prisma Browser, a SASE-native secure browser that blocks evasive attacks and brings LLM-augmented data classification to the endpoint, and Prisma AIRS 2.0, a full-lifecycle AI security platform. The company also outlines a pragmatic path to quantum-readiness and centralizes control with Strata Cloud Manager to simplify operations across hybrid environments.

Prisma AIRS 2.0: Unified Platform for Secure AI Agents

🔒 Prisma AIRS 2.0 is a unified AI security platform that delivers end-to-end visibility, risk assessment and automated defenses across agents, models and development pipelines. It consolidates Protect AI capabilities to provide posture and runtime protections for AI agents, model scanning and API-first controls for MLOps. The platform also offers continuous, autonomous red teaming and a managed MCP Server to embed threat detection into workflows.

Cortex AgentiX: Agentic AI Platform for Autonomous SOC

🤖 Palo Alto Networks introduces Cortex AgentiX, an agentic AI platform designed to build, deploy and govern autonomous security and IT agents. The vendor says AgentiX extends the Cortex foundation and leverages 1.2 billion playbook executions to deliver end-to-end agentic workflows and drive up to a 98% reduction in Mean Time to Respond with 75% less manual work. It ships with prebuilt agents for threat intelligence, email, endpoint, network, cloud and IT, and highlights full transparency, role-based controls and human-in-the-loop approvals. AgentiX is embedded in Cortex XSIAM and Cortex Cloud today; a standalone platform and Cortex XDR integration are slated for early 2026.

Google Public Sector Expands Investments in Partners

🚀 At Partner Connect during the Google Public Sector Summit, Google announced expanded investments to deepen collaboration and accelerate AI adoption across the public sector partner ecosystem. Highlights include increased Rapid Innovation Team funding, doubled capacity for Partner Development Sprints, and boosted Deal Acceleration Funds to shorten sales cycles. Google also launched three new Public Sector Partner Expertise badges for Google Distributed Cloud, Infrastructure Modernization, and Gemini for Government, a standardized Services Subcontractor Program, and an expanded ISV ATO Accelerator offering up to $250,000 in GCP credits plus $500,000 in services reimbursements to speed FedRAMP/Impact Level readiness. Partner Demo Portal improvements, enhanced analytics, new labs, and bootcamps round out efforts to simplify co-selling and accelerate partner time-to-market.

Merkle Tree Certificates pilot by Cloudflare and Chrome

🔐 Cloudflare is collaborating with Chrome to experimentally deploy Merkle Tree Certificates (MTCs) to reduce the number of public keys and large post-quantum signatures transmitted during TLS handshakes. MTCs batch certificates into a Merkle tree with a single signed treehead and per-certificate inclusion proofs, dramatically shrinking handshake size and CPU work. The experiment will roll out to a subset of Cloudflare free customers while Chrome distributes validation landmarks and fallbacks to preserve existing trust.

Cloudflare Workers: Automatic tracing now in open beta

🔍 Cloudflare announces an Open Beta for Workers tracing that provides automatic, out-of-the-box instrumentation with no code changes. Traces are visible in the Workers Observability dashboard alongside logs, and spans include timing, attributes, and error context. You can export OTLP-formatted traces and correlated logs to third-party providers like Honeycomb or Grafana. Enable tracing via wrangler.jsonc or the Cloudflare dashboard and join the beta to provide feedback.

Hardening Google Workspace: Practical Guidance for Teams

🔒 Small security teams can harden Google Workspace by enforcing MFA, restricting admin roles, and tightening sharing and OAuth app permissions. The article stresses stronger email defenses — advanced phishing controls, DMARC/DKIM/SPF — and proactive monitoring for account takeovers through alerts and behavioral signals. It argues native controls form a solid foundation but leave gaps, and recommends augmenting them with Material Security for unified visibility and automated remediation.

Amazon EC2 I7ie Instances Now in AWS GovCloud (US-West)

🚀 Amazon Web Services has made Amazon EC2 I7ie instances available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. I7ie instances, powered by 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors and 3rd-generation AWS Nitro SSDs, are designed for large storage I/O–intensive workloads and offer up to 120 TB of local NVMe, higher vCPU and memory densities, and up to 100 Gbps network bandwidth. AWS cites up to 40% better compute performance and 20% better price performance versus I3en, along with substantial improvements in storage throughput, latency, and latency variability for low-latency, high-random I/O use cases.

Amazon DocumentDB Planner V2.0 Improves Query Performance

🚀 Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) introduces PlannerVersion 2.0 for DocumentDB 5.0, delivering advanced query optimization and up to 10x performance improvements for indexed find and update operations. The new planner improves cost estimation, selects more optimal index plans, and adds index-scan support for negation operators such as $neq and $nin, as well as nested $elementMatch. Enabling PlannerVersion 2.0 requires a simple parameter change in your cluster parameter group and does not require a restart or incur downtime; you can revert to the legacy planner if needed.