All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔒 Azure IaaS combines a layered defense-in-depth architecture with Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative—secure by design, secure by default, and secure in operation—to protect compute, networking, storage, and operations. Hardware roots of trust, measured boot, and host isolation reduce platform exposure while VM protections such as Trusted Launch and confidential computing guard workloads at runtime. Network defaults enforce least privilege and private connectivity, and centralized telemetry in Azure Monitor and Defender for Cloud enables continuous detection and response.

📧 The Amazon Quick extension for Microsoft Outlook is now available in preview, embedding generative AI directly into email and calendar workflows. Using natural-language prompts, users can summarize unread messages, prioritize and organize mail, find specific discussions, schedule meetings, and draft contextual replies without leaving Outlook. The extension pulls relevant content from Amazon Quick spaces and knowledge bases and can trigger actions in external apps via configured integrations. Preview is available in several AWS regions; sign-up and documentation are provided on the Quick site.

🤖 Amazon SageMaker AI introduces an agentic experience that dramatically shortens model customization from months to days or hours. Using SageMaker AI model customization agent skills, developers interact via natural language coding agents to prepare data, fine-tune models, evaluate quality with LLM-as-a-judge metrics, and generate reusable code artifacts. Skills can be installed into IDEs via the sagemaker-ai agent plugin or used pre-installed in SageMaker Studio Notebooks, and support deployment to Amazon Bedrock or SageMaker AI endpoints.

🔐 AWS announced support for cross-account key sharing in AWS Payment Cryptography using resource-based policies (RBP). Organizations can now maintain a single authoritative copy of cryptographic keys and grant per-resource access to other AWS accounts—internal or external—without import/export workflows. This reduces duplication, simplifies key lineage and access control, and helps teams scale cryptography operations in cloud-hosted payment applications. The feature is available in all Regions where the service runs; consult the user guide to get started.

🔒 Chrome Enterprise Premium extends the familiar Chrome browser with enterprise-grade security, management, and healthcare-focused integrations to help clinicians access EHRs and web apps securely. It highlights advanced DLP, real-time URL scanning, phishing and malware protections, and controls to block copy/paste, printing, or screen capture of sensitive records. Google announced partnerships with Epic, Imprivata, AuthX, and Citrix to optimize EHR performance, enable passwordless authentication, streamline identity, and unify virtualized workflows. Eligible organizations are offered an extended 6-month trial, no-charge seats for the trial, $5,000 in services funding upon conversion, and high-touch onboarding.

🔐 OpenAI has published a roadmap titled 'Cybersecurity in the Intelligence Age' pledging to democratize AI-powered cyber defense and to extend its Trusted Access for Cyber (TAC) program. The April 30 paper, released shortly after the debut of GPT5.4-Cyber, outlines new TAC tiers for authenticated cyber defenders and wider inclusion of governments, major platforms, cloud hyperscalers and critical infrastructure operators. OpenAI also commits to strengthen internal red-teaming, misuse detection and safety mechanisms while collaborating with governments on threat models and intelligence sharing.

⚡ Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports the M8i and R8i instance families, powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors exclusive to AWS. These instances deliver up to 15% better price-performance and up to 2.5x more memory bandwidth versus equivalent 7th-generation Intel instances. You can modify existing RDS SQL Server instances or create new ones via the RDS Console, AWS SDK, or CLI. Review Amazon RDS for SQL Server Pricing for regional availability before migrating.

🖥️ Microsoft is testing a modernized Windows 11 Run dialog in preview Build 26300.8346 that adopts Fluent Design, enables dark mode, and shows icons in suggestion lists while preserving a minimalist interface. Microsoft reports a median time-to-show of 94 ms versus roughly 103 ms for the legacy dialog and expects further platform improvements. The rarely used Browse button was removed based on telemetry. The feature is optional and can be enabled via Settings > Advanced Settings while Microsoft collects feedback.

🚀 Amazon Bedrock AgentCore is now available in the AWS South America (São Paulo) Region. AgentCore provides a platform to build, connect, and optimize agents with runtime, identity, gateway, policy, observability, code interpreter, and browser tools available at launch. Customers can deploy agents closer to end users to reduce latency and meet data residency requirements, with security enforced at the infrastructure layer that agents cannot bypass.

🛡️ FreeRTOS 202604 LTS is now available, providing a two-year Long Term Support window with security updates, critical bug fixes, and feature stability for embedded and IoT device manufacturers. The FreeRTOS kernel advances to v11.3.0 with new hardware ports, security hardening, and expanded MPU support that reduces claimed MPU regions and allows reservation of hardware regions for application-specific protection. Core libraries include coreMQTT v5.0.2 (MQTT v5.0 features) and coreSNTP v2.0.0 (year-2038 readiness); the release emphasizes memory safety and MISRA-C compliance, with migration guides and an Extended Maintenance Plan to support upgrades.

🔧Cloudflare completed its Code Orange: Fail Small program after two quarters of focused engineering to prevent the November 18 and December 5, 2025 global outages. The work delivers safer configuration deployments through Snapstone, improved failure modes and segmentation to reduce blast radius, and revised break-glass and communications practices. Changes are codified in a mandatory Codex enforced by AI reviews to prevent regressions.

🎥 Amazon Web Services announced CloudWatch RUM Session Replay, a video-like playback feature that records clicks, scrolls, page changes, and client-side errors for web applications. It extends CloudWatch RUM's client-side performance and error telemetry by letting developers visually diagnose broken navigation flows, unresponsive UI elements, and silent UX failures. Session Replay is opt-in, supports sensitive field masking, is included at no additional cost, and is available in all AWS Regions where CloudWatch RUM is supported.

🔒 AWS outlines the Security Health Improvement Program (SHIP) as a no-cost, data-driven engagement to assess and prioritize fixes across 10 core cloud security use cases. The program uses actual environment data and AWS guidance to establish baselines needed for safe AI adoption and faster response to AI-accelerated vulnerability discovery. Customers can start via their account team or hands-on Activation Days.

🌐 Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports cross-region data access in OpenSearch UI, letting a single OpenSearch UI application query domains hosted in different AWS Regions without switching endpoints or replicating data. The capability works for domains in both public and VPC configurations and complements earlier cross-account data access so teams can combine accounts and Regions flexibly. It supports queries across primary and replica domains and uses both IAM and IAM Identity Center for authentication.

🛡️ AWS Security Assurance Services has published a new compliance guide, ISO 31000:2018 Risk Management on AWS, offering practical guidance for building and operating risk management programs in AWS environments. The guide explains how to apply ISO 31000:2018 principles to establish context, perform risk assessments, implement treatments, and enable continuous monitoring. It highlights governance aligned with the AWS Shared Responsibility Model and recommends strategies for avoidance, mitigation, transfer, and acceptance to support scalable, automated security and compliance.

🔒 Amazon CloudFront now supports WebSockets through VPC origins, allowing customers to host real-time, bidirectional applications entirely in private subnets. You can place Application Load Balancers, Network Load Balancers, and EC2 instances inside private subnets and expose them via a CloudFront distribution as the single entry point. This reduces attack surface, simplifies security management, and brings built-in DDoS protection to WebSockets workloads. WebSockets via VPC origins is available in all AWS Commercial Regions that support VPC origins at no additional cost.

🔒 IAM Roles Anywhere now lets you include the CreateSession API in VPC endpoint policies, enabling explicit allow or deny controls for session creation through endpoints. If CreateSession isn't explicitly allowed (or you don't permit all operations, e.g., "rolesanywhere:*"), requests made via the VPC endpoint will not return temporary AWS credentials. This closes a prior gap and delivers consistent, fine‑grained access control across all IAM Roles Anywhere API operations, available in all regions including GovCloud, European Sovereign Cloud, and China.

🔁 AWS Transform customers can now use BI migration agents to convert Power BI and Tableau dashboards into Amazon QuickSight assets, reducing migration effort from months to days. Built by Wavicle Data Solutions and delivered through AWS Marketplace, the new offering includes Analyzer and Converter agents for each source and operates entirely within your AWS account so no data leaves your environment. After conversion, administrators assign dashboards to BI authors for validation and publishing.

🔒 Microsoft announces Agent 365 is generally available, offering a unified control plane to observe, govern, and secure AI agents across endpoints, cloud, and SaaS. The release adds discovery of local and cloud agents (including OpenClaw, GitHub Copilot CLI, and Claude Code) and integrates with Intune and Defender for inventory, policy controls, runtime blocking, and alerting. Agent 365 also introduces Windows 365 for Agents, partner integrations, and licensing via Microsoft 365 E7 or standalone at USD 15 per user per month.

📈 Amazon Redshift now supports concurrency scaling for auto-copy and zero-ETL, improving ingestion throughput for both S3-based loads and near real-time replication from operational databases. Enabled for Amazon Redshift Serverless and RA3 provisioned warehouses across all commercial and GovCloud regions, this feature automatically adds compute to handle spikes in reads and writes. Organizations can immediately enable it to maintain faster, consistent ingestion during peak loads.