All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔒 The accelerating threat landscape driven by AI and automation is compressing exploit windows and amplifying attacker efficiency, making basic cyber hygiene essential. Fortinet’s research highlights faster time-to-exploit and the maturation of a criminal supply chain offering credentials, malware, and services. Embedding routine protective behaviors—like MFA, patching, and timely reporting—into daily operations strengthens resilience and reduces attacker opportunities.

🚀 This post introduces Cortex XCOR, an AI-native observability platform from Palo Alto Networks that aims to deliver autonomous root cause analysis and remediation. The platform centers on the XCOR Operator and specialized AI agents, including an AI SRE that autonomously investigates incidents and recommends fixes. XCOR integrates full-stack telemetry with cost optimization to balance visibility and spending.

🎉 Cloudflare announces two public models—EuroLLM and Apertus—now available via Workers AI, plus hands-on workshops to help government cyber agencies build model-agnostic AI defenses. EuroLLM covers 35 languages including all 24 EU official languages, while Apertus is Switzerland's fully open multilingual model trained on over 15 trillion tokens. The company emphasizes choice and open standards to avoid vendor lock-in and strengthen national AI resilience.

🔒 Amazon S3 Object Lock variable retention with event holds is now available in AWS GovCloud (US-East) and AWS GovCloud (US-West). This feature lets you place an event hold with a retention duration so objects receive WORM protection starting from a future event, such as a contract close or audit completion. Unlike legal holds, event holds enforce retention for the specified period after release, helping meet event-based regulatory requirements without over-retention. Cohasset Associates has assessed this capability for SEC, FINRA, and CFTC compliance contexts.

🔒 Cloudflare Workers now exposes post-quantum primitives in Web Crypto, enabling developers to experiment with ML-KEM and ML-DSA via new APIs like encapsulateBits(), decapsulateKey(), getPublicKey(), and SubtleCrypto.supports(). Available behind the webcrypto_modern_algorithms compatibility flag, this runtime-level support reduces the need to bundle third-party crypto implementations and lets libraries delegate operations to the native environment. The initial implementation on workerd uses BoringSSL and includes ML-KEM-768 and ML-DSA-44 with additional variants provisioned for testing.

🚀 The Google Cloud team has released google-cloud-swift, an official server-side SDK built for Swift 6.2+ that leverages Swift NIO, HTTP/2, gRPC, and compile-time concurrency safety. Designed for high-throughput microservices and DevOps tooling, the SDK supports over 100 Google Cloud services and works on macOS and Linux. It enables ARC-based deterministic memory management, async/await ergonomics, and integrates with Application Default Credentials and Workload Identity Federation for secure authentication.

🚀 Today Cloudflare announced Workers KV Instant, a new mode for Workers KV that uses Quicksilver to deliver globally replicated key-value data with immediate availability and dramatically reduced read latency. KV Instant targets infrequently updated configuration and feature-flag data, offering p99 read latencies under two milliseconds and writes replicating to the edge in ~250ms for 99% of writes. It preserves the Workers KV API with a few differences in metadata, list pagination, and a one-write-per-namespace-per-second restriction, and is launching in private beta with distinct pricing tailored to read-heavy workloads.

🧭 Cloudflare’s AI Search is now generally available, combining Workers AI, Vectorize, R2, and Browser Run into a managed index and retrieval pipeline. The release adds native image embeddings, OCR for PDFs, and support for larger files, while introducing billing starting November 1, 2026 alongside a continued free tier. The service preserves both textual captions and pixel embeddings for richer multimodal retrieval and uses Matryoshka Representation Learning to keep embeddings efficient.

🛠️ Cloudflare has launched Artifacts, a versioned filesystem that speaks Git and scales to millions of repositories, designed as programmable primitives developers can use to build workflows and agent-driven products. Artifacts now integrates with Workers Builds to deploy production branches and Workers Previews for other branches, supports repository events for automation, offers jurisdictional data controls, and exposes repository metrics in the dashboard. The open beta invites developers to build the next-generation Git platform for hundreds or thousands of agents working concurrently, with a competition accepting submissions through October 14, 2026.

📣 Today Cloudflare announced K2, a public beta serverless event streaming primitive on the Developer Platform. K2 stores events as an ordered, partitioned durable log built on R2 object storage, enabling independent consumers to read at their own pace and supporting long-term retention. It targets high-scale data movement and fan-out consumption, with higher produce latency due to object storage writes. K2 integrates with Workers, supports subscriptions for parallel reads, and is available now for Workers Paid accounts with beta limits and no usage billing.

🛠️ Today Cloudflare announces Basin, the generally available name for its serverless data analytics platform built on Apache Iceberg and R2 Object Storage. Basin includes Pipelines for ingestion, Catalog for managed Iceberg tables, and SQL for distributed querying, all designed for speed, openness, and cost efficiency. The platform supports Iceberg-compatible tools, provides free egress, usage-based billing, and a developer-friendly workflow with integrations across Cloudflare services.

🛠️ Microsoft has enabled the Windows settings backup and restore feature by default for enterprise devices that are Microsoft Entra-joined or hybrid-joined and upgraded to Windows 11 26H2. The tool, originally introduced as an opt-in feature and later made generally available, backs up users' Windows settings and Microsoft Store app lists after device resets, replacements, upgrades, or reimages. The default-on policy applies only where admins have not explicitly configured the setting and excludes devices in DMA-regulated regions, sovereign clouds, or restricted environments. Restore remains admin-controlled and can be managed or disabled via Intune or Group Policy.

📘 AWS Transfer Family now lets you select a custom Amazon CloudWatch Logs group for managed workflow execution logs. You can assign a distinct log destination per workflow or consolidate logs from multiple workflows into a shared group for unified metrics and dashboards. Workflow logs remain structured JSON and queryable with CloudWatch Logs Insights, and the feature is available in all Regions offering Transfer Family managed workflows.

🔒 AWS Security Hub now groups related exposure findings into remediation plans that target shared root causes. Each plan provides prioritization (Critical, High, Medium, Low), impact assessment, and step-by-step remediation instructions with examples for AWS CLI, Terraform, CloudFormation, Python, and CDK. Security Hub automatically ranks plans by potential risk reduction so teams can focus on the most impactful fixes, and AI agents can consume the plans via API to automate remediation. Remediation plans are available in all Regions where Security Hub is offered and included at no extra cost under the AWS Security Hub Essentials plan.

🔒 Modern browsers are central enterprise workspaces and require embedded security. Chrome Enterprise Premium captures high-fidelity browser telemetry to surface in-browser threats that legacy EDR and perimeter tools miss, including risks from shadow AI and autonomous agents. Streaming these signals into security operations enables proactive mitigation, automated response, and reduced investigation time, demonstrated in Mandiant case studies.

🚀 Amazon EKS Auto Mode now supports advanced node tuning via the NodeClass resource, enabling kubelet, Linux kernel sysctl, and hugepage configuration directly through the Kubernetes API. advancedCompute lets you set user namespaces for rootless builds, adjust eviction thresholds and log rotation, raise network and ARP cache limits, and pre-allocate 2Mi or 1Gi hugepages for HPC and low-latency workloads. EKS Auto Mode validates and applies settings at node boot and preserves them across scaling and upgrades, with no custom AMIs, EC2 launch templates, or privileged DaemonSets to manage.

🔧 Amazon EMR Serverless now supports up to 1TB of shuffle storage per job, up from the previous 200 GB limit, enabling production-scale Apache Spark workloads without managing clusters. This change helps data engineers and scientists run large joins, aggregations, and sorts that generate heavy shuffle traffic by providing spill-to-disk support and improved job reliability. The feature is available in emr-7.14, emr-spark-8.1 and later, across 18 AWS Regions where EMR Serverless is offered.

🔍 Amazon Route 53 Global Resolver and DNS Firewall now integrate with Amazon CloudWatch to provide DNS analytics and insights. These features let network and security teams observe DNS query patterns, evaluate DNS Firewall rule effectiveness, detect anomalies, and optimize DNS performance. An Analytics tab in the Global Resolver and DNS Firewall consoles centralizes access, and CloudWatch Metrics and Contributor Insights enable metric filters, searches, and alarms. Standard CloudWatch pricing applies to opted-in metrics.

🔧 AWS Glue Data Catalog now supports table optimization, statistics, and crawlers for Apache Iceberg Version 3 (V3) tables. With table optimization you can compact V3 tables using binpack, sort, or z-order strategies and remove expired snapshots and orphan files. Glue can generate NDV statistics for V3 types and Glue crawlers can discover V3 tables in Amazon S3 and register them in the Glue Data Catalog.

📧 AWS Budgets now verifies new email subscribers before sending budget alerts. When you add an email address to a budget notification, AWS sends a verification email and the recipient begins receiving notifications only after confirming via the provided link. Verification applies to addresses added from 9/30/26 onward and is shown in the AWS Budgets console with a resend option for pending confirmations. This feature is available in all Regions except AWS GovCloud (US) and China Regions.