All news in category "Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch"

Google Extends Android In-Call Scam Protection to US Banks

🔒 Google is expanding its Android in-call scam protection to cover several U.S. financial apps, including Cash App and the JPMorgan Chase mobile banking app. The feature, introduced with Android 16, warns users when they launch a financial app while sharing their screen during a call with an unknown number, presenting a persistent 30-second alert that only allows ending the call. The protection runs on Android 11 and later and remains in a testing phase.

Automated Metadata Generation in Google Data Cloud

🧭 Google announces generally available automated metadata generation in the Google Data Cloud, using Dataplex Universal Catalog and Gemini to convert profiling and schema context into human-readable table and column descriptions. The capability integrates with BigQuery, stores generated descriptions for search and governance, and is accessible via an API. It aims to reduce "metadata debt," accelerate time-to-insight, and provide reliable grounding for AI agents, while still encouraging human review for key business definitions.

CME Group modernizes exchange infrastructure with Cloud SQL

🚀 CME Group partnered with Google Cloud to migrate its critical trading databases to Cloud SQL, aiming to sustain ultra-low-latency operations and reduce operational overhead. The managed service provides built-in observability and AI-assisted insights that surface anomalies and suggest query optimizations, enabling teams to identify root causes in minutes. As a result, administrators focus on strategic improvements while developers iterate faster and collaborate across environments.

Azure expands local and hybrid options for AI and control

🔒 Microsoft is expanding Azure with on‑premises, edge, and hybrid options to deliver AI, resilience, and operational sovereignty. Azure Local provides integrated compute, storage, and networking on customer premises with GA features like Microsoft 365 Local and NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, plus previews for disconnected operations and multi‑rack scale. Coupled with Azure IoT, Microsoft Fabric, and Azure Arc management enhancements, the updates enable near‑real‑time analytics, secure device identity, and a unified control plane for distributed estates. The goal is to accelerate AI and analytics while preserving data residency, continuity, and compliance for regulated or mission‑critical environments.

Android expands in-call scam protection to banks and fintech

🔒 Android is expanding its pilot for in-call scam protection that detects when users launch participating financial apps while screen sharing during calls from unsaved numbers. The feature warns users, offers a one-tap end-call and stop-sharing option, and enforces a 30-second pause to disrupt social engineering. After UK success and pilots in Brazil and India, Google is rolling pilots with US fintechs including Cash App and banks like JPMorganChase.

NCSC's Share and Defend Blocks Nearly One Billion in UK

🔒 The UK's National Cyber Security Agency (NCSC) reports its Share and Defend service has blocked almost one billion attempts to access malicious websites in under a year. Launched in May 2024, the service aggregates threat intelligence and indicators of compromise (IOCs) from partners and data sources, then shares them with ISPs such as BT, Vodafone, and TalkTalk for DNS filtering. When users try to follow phishing links, fraudulent texts or scam adverts, connections to known malicious domains are stopped automatically. The initiative supports the government's Stop! Think Fraud campaign and aims to reduce online fraud for consumers and businesses.

Fortinet Named Challenger in Gartner Email Security MQ

📧 Fortinet was named a Challenger in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Email Security, reflecting continued progress across its email protection portfolio. FortiMail Email Security and FortiMail Workspace Security combine AI-native detection, sandboxing, DMARC, enhanced BEC and account takeover defenses, and flexible on-premises and cloud deployment options. The company positions this suite as a cost-effective, integrated alternative that also extends protection to web browsers, cloud storage, and collaboration apps.

Secure SD-WAN as the Foundation for Successful SASE

🔒Fortinet positions secure SD-WAN as the essential foundation for effective SASE, arguing that unified networking and security deliver consistent policy enforcement and optimized connectivity across hybrid and cloud environments. Integrated capabilities such as local internet breakout, built-in ZTNA, and application-aware routing reduce latency and attack surface while improving user experience. AI-enhanced operations and centralized management simplify troubleshooting and accelerate deployments.

Check Point Named Leader in Gartner 2025 Email Security

✅ Check Point has been recognized as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Email Security. This independent evaluation reinforces our commitment to delivering best-in-class email protection that blocks increasingly sophisticated threats while remaining easy to deploy and manage. According to Check Point Research, 68% of attacks start with email and 61% of harmful files are delivered as HTML attachments, underscoring the need for robust, reliable defenses.

Amazon SageMaker HyperPod Adds Checkpointless Training

🚀 Amazon SageMaker HyperPod now supports checkpointless training, a foundational capability that eliminates the need for checkpoint-based, job-level restarts for distributed model training. Checkpointless training preserves forward training state across the cluster, automatically swaps out failed nodes, and uses peer-to-peer state transfer to resume progress, reducing recovery time from hours to minutes. The feature can deliver up to 95% training goodput at very large scale, is available in all Regions where HyperPod runs, and can be enabled with zero code changes for popular recipes or with minimal PyTorch modifications for custom models.

TypeScript Preview and Updates for Strands Agents on AWS

🚀 AWS has announced TypeScript support in preview for the Strands Agents SDK, giving developers a choice between Python and TypeScript for building model-driven AI agents. The TypeScript implementation provides idiomatic, type-safe APIs with async/await and modern JavaScript/TypeScript patterns, and is designed to run in browsers, client applications, and server runtimes such as AWS Lambda and Bedrock AgentCore. AWS also introduced three SDK updates: edge device support is now GA, Strands steering is available experimentally, and Strands evaluations is in preview to help validate agent behavior.

AWS SageMaker AI adds serverless model customization

🚀 Amazon SageMaker AI now offers a serverless model customization capability that lets developers quickly fine-tune popular models using supervised learning, reinforcement learning, and direct preference optimization. The fully managed, end-to-end workflow simplifies data preparation, synthetic data generation, training, evaluation, and deployment through an easy-to-use interface. Supported base models include Amazon Nova, Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek, and GPT-OSS. The AI agent-guided workflow is in preview with regional availability and a waitlist.

Building Conversational Genomics with Multi-Agent AI

🧬 Combining Google’s ADK, Gemini, and Cloud infrastructure, this work reframes variant interpretation as a conversational workflow that removes repetitive scripting and context switching. A two-phase design performs heavy VEP annotation once, stores versioned ADK artifacts and public BigQuery datasets, and enables sub-5-second interactive queries via a QueryAgent. Validation with an APOB spike-in demonstrated single-variant precision, compatibility across DeepVariant versions, and scalability to ~8.8M variants.

Amazon SageMaker HyperPod Adds Elastic Training at Scale

⚡ Amazon SageMaker HyperPod now supports elastic training, automatically scaling distributed training jobs to absorb idle accelerators and contract when higher‑priority workloads require resources. This eliminates the manual cycle of halting jobs, reconfiguring parameters, and restarting distributed training, which previously demanded specialized engineering time. Organizations can start training with minimal resources and grow opportunistically, improving cluster utilization and reducing costs. Elastic training can be enabled with zero code changes for public models like Llama and GPT OSS, and requires only lightweight configuration updates for custom architectures.

Amazon Bedrock Adds Reinforcement Fine‑Tuning for Models

🔧 Amazon Bedrock now supports reinforcement fine-tuning, enabling developers to improve model accuracy without deep ML expertise or large labeled datasets. The service automates the reinforcement fine-tuning workflow and trains models by learning from feedback on multiple candidate responses, improving model judgment about what makes a good reply. AWS reports an average 66% accuracy gain over base models, allowing teams to deploy smaller, faster, and more cost-effective variants while maintaining quality. At launch the feature supports Amazon Nova 2 Lite, and it can be accessed via the Bedrock console or APIs.

GKE Turns 10 Hackathon: Winners and Technical Highlights

🚀 The GKE Turns 10 Hackathon showcased developer teams building agentic AI on GKE integrated with Google models such as Gemini. More than 4,700 participants from 133 countries produced 133 projects demonstrating multi-agent pipelines, model orchestration, and microservice integration. Grand prize winner Amie Wei’s Cart-to-Kitchen assistant uses GKE Autopilot, the Agent Development Kit (ADK), and Agent-to-Agent protocols to analyze grocery carts and recommend recipes. Google also announced GEAR, an educational sprint launching in early 2026 to help developers learn, build, and deploy AI agents.

Microsoft Defender portal outage disrupts XDR access

⚠️ Microsoft is mitigating an ongoing incident affecting the Defender XDR portal that began roughly 10 hours ago and was first acknowledged at 06:10 UTC. The outage stemmed from a traffic spike that drove high CPU utilization on components responsible for portal functions, blocking access and disrupting features such as advanced threat-hunting alerts and device visibility. Microsoft applied mitigation to increase processing throughput and reports partial recovery for some customers while it analyzes HAR traces and coordinates client-side diagnostics with impacted organizations.

AWS Preview: EC2 M8azn Instances with 5GHz AMD CPUs

🚀 Starting today, AWS is previewing new general-purpose high-frequency Amazon EC2 M8azn instances powered by fifth-generation AMD EPYC processors that deliver up to 5 GHz maximum CPU frequency. These instances offer up to 2× the compute performance of M5zn and about 24% higher performance than M8a, and are built on the AWS Nitro System for secure, high-performance cloud delivery. They target workloads such as gaming, HFT, HPC, CI/CD, and simulation modeling; customers can request preview access.

Ten Years of Microsoft and Red Hat: Open Innovation

🚀 Over the past decade Microsoft and Red Hat have built a strategic partnership centered on open source and enterprise cloud innovation. Together they delivered offerings such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Azure and Azure Red Hat OpenShift, combining managed services, integrated support, and Marketplace availability. At Ignite 2025 the collaboration brought GA of OpenShift Virtualization and Confidential Containers, enabling VMs and hardware-isolated containers to run side-by-side for modernization and secure workloads.

Fortinet and AWS at re:Invent: Expanding Cloud Security

🔒 Fortinet announced expanded integrations with AWS at re:Invent, including Fortinet Managed IPS Rules for AWS Network Firewall, FortiSASE on AWS Marketplace, and participation in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. These offerings combine AI-driven FortiGuard threat intelligence, simplified procurement and Euro-denominated options for EU customers. The goal is to reduce operational burden, accelerate compliance with standards like PCI-DSS and HIPAA, and enable rapid deployment and scaling across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.