All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔒 Microsoft will block legacy TLS connections for POP and IMAP access to Exchange Online starting July 2026, deprecating TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1. Connections that attempt to use those versions will fail, which may prevent older email clients, devices, or embedded systems from connecting. The company says most customers won't be affected because the majority of traffic already uses TLS 1.2 or later. Administrators are advised to verify client configurations, update custom or legacy systems, and avoid legacy endpoints to prevent disruption.

🔍 Microsoft has expanded Microsoft Sentinel UEBA to ingest and enrich AWS CloudTrail alongside other cloud and identity sources, enabling behavioral anomaly detection across hybrid environments from a single pane. The solution delivers precomputed binary behavioral features and machine‑driven anomalies into the BehaviorAnalytics and Anomalies tables, letting analysts stack simple true/false signals such as first‑time geography, uncommon ISP, unusual action, and high operation volume. By shifting baseline management to UEBA, teams reduce heavy KQL baselines, accelerate triage, and surface low‑and‑slow or blended attacker behavior.

📝 Amazon Quick now supports integrated document and visual creation directly within chat conversations, enabling users to produce polished Word, PDF, PowerPoint, and Excel files without leaving the interface. The capability also generates images, infographics, charts, and other visuals that can be embedded or exported as standalone files. Visual creation is currently in preview in US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon), while document creation is available across supported Regions. Users can sign up for free without an AWS account or credit card.

🔗 Amazon Quick now provides 13 new built-in action connectors that let business users take direct actions across Google Workspace, Zoom, Airtable, QuickBooks, Dropbox, and Microsoft Teams without leaving the assistant. Each connector supports managed authentication, enabling secure account connections in a few clicks without manual credential handling. The connectors handle authorization flows on behalf of users and are available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Quick is offered.

🖥️ Amazon Quick is now available as a native desktop preview for macOS and Windows, extending the assistant beyond the browser to leverage local files, OS-level notifications, and native desktop controls. The desktop app can read and work with files on the machine without uploading them, surface action-item, calendar, and message alerts, and automate both browser-based and desktop workflows. Memory, knowledge graph, and agents are shared with the web experience, and the preview supports local Model Context Protocol (MCP) connections for coding agents.

🚀 Amazon has introduced new Free and Plus pricing plans for Amazon Quick, enabling sign-up in minutes using a personal email or existing Google, Apple, GitHub, or Amazon credentials—no AWS account required. A guided onboarding helps users get value in under five minutes with role-specific workflows for sales, marketing, finance, operations, and more. Quick connects to applications and data to turn questions into actions—scheduling meetings, sending emails, following up on items—and builds a personal knowledge graph that learns preferences and priorities. Professional and Enterprise plans add agentic business intelligence, governance, and expanded user support.

📧 Microsoft has asked iPhone users to manually re-enter credentials in the default Mail app to restore access to Outlook and Hotmail accounts after a global sign-in outage. The company reported intermittent sign-in failures and some users being signed out or seeing "too many requests" errors, attributing the disruption to a "recently introduced change." Service health was reported as restored around 7 PM UTC, but iOS users must follow a step-by-step procedure in Settings → Mail → Accounts to update passwords. Microsoft has not disclosed the outage's root cause, scale, or affected regions.

🔒 CrowdStrike has expanded its integration with ChatGPT Enterprise to deliver deeper audit logging and continuous activity monitoring within Falcon Shield SaaS security. The enhancement ingests OpenAI’s expanded logs to capture authentication events, administrative changes, tool and Codex usage, and conversation-level records across workspaces. By correlating AI activity with identity, device, and SaaS telemetry, the capability aims to detect suspicious behaviors, enforce policy, and support faster investigations. This marks a shift from configuration visibility to operational threat detection for AI-driven workflows.

🔒 This buyer's guide explains what Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) is, which core capabilities to expect, and which vendors and solutions are recommended. It highlights EDR features such as real-time behavioral telemetry, deep investigation tools, centralized analytics, and integrations with SIEM, SOAR, firewalls and other security controls. Vendor profiles include CrowdStrike, Microsoft, Palo Alto, SentinelOne, Sophos and Trend Micro, and four practical questions to ask vendors before purchasing are provided.

⚙️ At Google Cloud Next '26, Google announced Fluid Compute and a broad set of compute, networking, and storage updates to support both traditional and agentic AI workloads with better performance and lower cost. Key moves include GA of the Arm-based Axion N4A, a GKE Agent Sandbox running on Axion, previews of bare-metal Axion C4A.metal and network-optimized C4N, and expanded Flexible Committed Use Discounts. The changes emphasize elastic scaling for spiky agent workloads, isolated runtime sandboxes, and higher I/O and VM-to-VM bandwidth to reduce contention and TCO.

🚀Google announced a broad expansion of AI infrastructure at Google Cloud Next, presenting the AI Hypercomputer — an integrated stack of dedicated hardware, software, and flexible consumption models. The release highlights new accelerators including TPU 8t and TPU 8i, A5X GPU instances, and Axion N4A CPUs, plus megascale Virgo networking and storage improvements. These changes target agentic workloads to improve latency, utilization, and cost-efficiency for enterprise and consumer AI.

🤖 Amazon Redshift Serverless now enables AI-driven scaling and optimization by default for all new workgroups, using machine learning to predict compute needs and automatically adjust resources before queries queue. The update expands support to workloads with a Base RPU range of 8–512 RPU, lowering the entry cost. Use the price-performance slider to prioritize cost, performance, or a balance; Amazon Redshift also applies automatic materialized views and table design optimizations. Configure targets via the AWS Management Console or the Amazon Redshift API; settings can be modified after workgroup creation and are available in all Regions where Serverless is offered.

🔍 Amazon CloudWatch RUM now provides an improved App Monitors overview that surfaces fleet-wide health, SLO breaches, and distributed tracing coverage on a single page. The new view groups monitors into four summary cards — Needs attention, Trending worse, Setup and coverage, and SLOs and Alarms — and offers quick filters, per-row SLI and tracing links, and a selectable side panel for deeper context. The enhancement is available in all AWS commercial Regions where CloudWatch RUM is offered at no additional cost.

🚀 Amazon Redshift Serverless is now generally available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) and Canada West (Calgary) regions. The serverless offering removes the need to provision or manage clusters by automatically provisioning and scaling compute for analytics workloads. Users can query data directly in S3 in open formats (Parquet, Iceberg), access data shares, restore snapshots, and use Query Editor V2 or existing BI tools, with per-second compute billing and unified query cost reporting.

🚀 Amazon Elastic VMware Service (Amazon EVS) now supports the i7i.metal-24xl Amazon EC2 bare-metal instance, providing a lower-core-count option with a 5th-generation Intel Xeon processor. This delivers improved cost-performance and scaling flexibility for VMware-based workloads on EVS. Customers can expect up to 23% better compute performance and over 10% better price performance versus i4i for x86 storage-optimized use cases. The release is available in Regions that offer both Amazon EVS and EC2 i7i.

🔒 AWS Key Management Service (KMS) now surfaces the timestamp, operation type, and AWS CloudTrail event ID for the last cryptographic operation performed with each KMS key, viewable in the console or via API. This eliminates manual log queries and helps administrators and compliance teams quickly identify unused keys, verify active usage, and trace key activity. A new condition key, kms:TrailingDaysWithoutKeyUsage, enables policy-based protection against accidental deletion of recently used keys, and the capability is available in all AWS Regions including GovCloud and China.

📎 Amazon Connect now supports attachment file sizes up to 100 MB for chat, cases, and tasks, increased from the previous 20 MB limit. Administrators can enable the higher limits and configure custom file extensions for attachments across chat, email, cases, and tasks via the Amazon Connect admin website or APIs. This reduces back-and-forth by allowing customers to upload diagnostic bundles, log archives, signed contracts, and other larger documents directly during interactions; the feature is available in multiple AWS Regions.

💳 AWS Billing Conductor now supports the new Passthrough Pricing Plan for Billing Transfer users. Customers can select this AWS-managed plan when configuring a new transfer in the Billing Transfer page or apply it to existing billing groups via the AWS Billing Conductor console. Under the plan, accounts in a billing group see billable data that reflects the AWS invoice value in both My View and Showback/Chargeback views. The feature is available in US East (N. Virginia) and is offered free of charge for qualifying Direct Customers and Channel Partners.

🔒 Microsoft announced that Azure Local now supports deployments of up to thousands of servers within a single sovereign environment. The platform extends the Azure operating model to customer-owned datacenters, edge sites and industrial facilities with local policy enforcement, role-based access control, auditing and compliance capabilities even when disconnected. Validated compute and storage partners, plus Intel® Xeon® 6 and GPU support, let organizations run large-scale, latency-sensitive AI and regulated workloads entirely within their sovereign boundary while retaining lifecycle management through Azure.

📣 You can now create Amazon FSx for OpenZFS Single-AZ (HA) file systems in 17 additional AWS Regions across South America, Europe, Africa, Asia Pacific, and AWS GovCloud (US). FSx for OpenZFS delivers sub-millisecond latencies, multi-GB/s throughput, and ZFS capabilities such as snapshots, data cloning, and compression. The Single-AZ (HA) option is a cost-effective choice for workloads that require high availability within a single AZ but do not need cross-AZ storage redundancy.