All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔒 Amazon Quick now includes an ACL Permission Checker for knowledge bases with document-level ACLs, enabling administrators to verify whether a specific user can access a particular document without manually tracing permission inheritance. To use it, open a knowledge base with ACLs enabled, go to the Sync reports tab, choose View Access Details for any synced item, and enter the user's email in the Permission Checker to get an immediate result. The Access Details panel also lists all users and groups with access so administrators gain full visibility into applied permissions. The checker returns one of three outcomes: the user has access, the user does not have access, or no ACL was found for the document.

🔒 Amazon Quick now supports document-level access controls (ACLs) for Microsoft SharePoint knowledge bases, allowing organizations to preserve native SharePoint permissions when indexing content. Quick uses a dual approach—ACL replication for fast pre-retrieval filtering paired with real-time permission checks against SharePoint at query time—to avoid stale or incorrectly mapped access. Administrators can enable this in an admin-managed SharePoint knowledge base in the Quick console; the feature is available in all Regions where Quick is offered.

🔐 The article highlights that Forrester estimates each password reset costs roughly $70 and that self-service password reset (SSPR) tools have not eliminated helpdesk involvement. Attackers target resets to bypass MFA, as illustrated by the April 2025 Marks & Spencer incident tied to the Scattered Spider group, which began with a social-engineered reset and escalated to NTDS.dit extraction and ransomware. It recommends identity verification tools such as Specops Secure Service Desk, strong single-use temporary credentials, monitoring of reset activity, and clearer helpdesk procedures to reduce risk.

🛡️ Check Point has been honored with Frost & Sullivan’s 2026 Technology Innovation Leadership recognition for WAF and API security. The accolade underscores a shift in application security as apps span APIs, microservices, AI-driven services and hybrid/multi‑cloud deployments. Check Point’s WAF is positioned to help organizations secure rapid DevSecOps releases, reduce attack surface and protect both traditional web and emerging AI applications.

🤖 At Google Cloud Next day 2, the developer keynote focused on the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, demonstrating tools to build, simulate, evaluate, and scale autonomous agents. Presentations covered the Agent Development Kit (ADK), Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, Agent Runtime, Memory Bank, Agent Registry, A2UI/A2A standards, and debugging with Gemini Cloud Assist. Speakers also addressed security and governance with Agent Identity, Agent Gateway, and partner demos from Wiz, and released source code and codelabs to help teams adopt agentic development.

🔒 Amazon S3 now supports five additional checksum algorithms — MD5, XXHash3, XXHash64, XXHash128, and SHA-512 — bringing the total to ten. S3 will validate and store the checksum you provide on upload, compute composite checksums for multipart uploads, and return stored checksums on download for verification. If you do not supply a checksum, CRC64NVME is applied by default. The new options integrate with replication, S3 Inventory, and S3 Batch Operations and are available across 37 AWS Regions at no extra cost.

🛡️ Google unveiled a suite of agentic AI defenses at Google Cloud Next '26 to help SOC teams manage a surge of vulnerabilities tied to Anthropic Mythos. The launch includes three new agents in Google Security Operations — threat hunting, detection engineering, and third-party context — plus expanded Wiz integrations and an AI-BOM to inventory AI components. Additional controls like Agent Identity, Agent Gateway, and Model Armor aim to govern the emerging 'agentic web' and mitigate prompt injection, data leakage, and shadow AI risks.

🔐 Google announced a shift to agent-centric security at Google Cloud Next '26, positioning AI agents to help SOC teams respond to the potential surge of vulnerabilities tied to Anthropic's Mythos. It introduced three new agents in Google Security Operations — a threat hunting agent, a detection engineering agent and a third-party context agent — and said its existing triage agent has processed over five million alerts, reducing analysis from about 30 minutes to roughly a minute with Gemini. Additional moves include expanded Wiz integrations, an AI-BOM to inventory AI components, agentic automation features, Model Armor protections, Agent Identity and Agent Gateway controls, and modern IAM simplifications to streamline permissions.

🛡️ Google has launched the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, a hub for managing agentic AI that assigns each agent a unique cryptographic ID to enable traceable, auditable actions and map to authorization policies. The platform centralizes agents, tools and skills in an Agent Registry and offers an Agent Gateway to enforce agent-to-agent and agent-to-tool policies, apply Model Armor protections, and support MCP and A2A protocols. New detection and security features include real-time Agent Anomaly Detection, an Agent Security dashboard integrated with Security Command Center, and specialized security agents for threat hunting, detection engineering and third-party context enrichment.

🔔 AWS Backup now supports Amazon Aurora point-in-time recovery (PITR) in six additional AWS Regions: Malaysia, Thailand, Taipei, New Zealand, Canada West (Calgary) and Mexico (Central). The expansion enables policy-based data protection and time-based recovery for Aurora clusters via backup plans. To protect clusters, add them to an existing or new backup plan and ensure continuous backups or PITR are enabled on the relevant backup rule. Management is available via the AWS Backup console, CLI, or SDKs.

🔒 Microsoft will integrate Anthropic’s Mythos Preview into its Security Development Lifecycle, using the model alongside other advanced AI to surface vulnerabilities earlier in the software development process. The company says the move aims to strengthen and harden core products including Windows, Azure, and Microsoft 365 by improving automated detection and secure coding. Analysts note the shift signals frontier models moving from experimental tools into standard engineering workflows while raising dual-use concerns.

🔒 Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio now runs notebook kernels inside the domain-configured Amazon VPC, providing network isolation for interactive ML and data workloads. Kernels inherit VPC settings, subnets, and security groups defined at the domain level, enabling centralized network policy and secure access to private databases, internal APIs, and non-public data sources. This VPC configuration applies to the interactive compute where Python code and dataframes execute; other compute engines have separate VPC considerations. VPC-enabled kernels are available in all Regions where SageMaker Unified Studio is supported.

🚀 At Google Cloud Next ’26, Google presented a unified stack to move AI into enterprise production, anchored by Gemini Enterprise as the connective tissue between data, people, and goals. Key launches include the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform for building, scaling, governing, and optimizing agents, and the AI Hypercomputer with next-generation TPU 8 chips. Google also outlined the Agentic Data Cloud to ground agents in enterprise context, expanded security agents in Agentic Defense, Workspace Intelligence enhancements, and cross-cloud data capabilities to accelerate real-world deployment.

🚀 Google Cloud has integrated partner-built agents from its Agent Marketplace into the Agent Gallery inside the Gemini Enterprise app, creating a centrally governed hub for discovering and managing specialist, role-specific AI. Featured partners — including Accenture, Adobe, Atlassian, Palo Alto Networks, Salesforce and others — must pass a four-step evaluation to earn the Google Cloud Ready - Gemini Enterprise badge. Built-in safeguards such as cryptographic agent identities, Agent Gateway, and Model Armor protect data and prevent use for model training. Customers can trial the Gallery, while partners can apply to the AI Agents Program and access a rapid deployment framework.

🧑‍💻 Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio now lets data workers create and manage multiple code spaces within a single project for IAM domains. Each space maintains its own persistent Amazon EBS volume and independent compute and storage settings, and can be paused, resumed, or connected to a local IDE while preserving files and session state. This enables parallel workstreams and isolated experiments with tailored runtimes and is available in all Regions where SageMaker Unified Studio is offered.

🚀 Amazon has launched EC2 C8i-flex instances in Europe (Ireland, London) and Asia Pacific (New Zealand). Powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors exclusive to AWS, C8i-flex deliver up to 15% better price-performance and 2.5x the memory bandwidth versus prior Intel-based instances, and up to 20% higher throughput than C7i-flex. AWS reports workload-specific gains — up to 60% faster NGINX, 40% for deep learning recommendation models, and 35% for Memcached — and offers sizes from large to 16xlarge purchasable via Savings Plans, On-Demand, and Spot.

⚡ Starting today, Amazon EC2 C8i instances are available in Europe (Ireland) and Asia Pacific (New Zealand). Powered by AWS-exclusive custom Intel Xeon 6 processors, C8i delivers up to 15% better price-performance and 2.5x the memory bandwidth versus previous Intel-based instances, and up to 20% higher performance than C7i. AWS reports workload-specific gains — up to 60% faster for NGINX, 40% for deep learning recommendation models, and 35% for Memcached. The family includes 13 sizes (two bare metal and a new 96xlarge) and can be purchased via Savings Plans, On-Demand, or Spot.

🔒 AWS Network Firewall supports expanded managed rule groups from AWS Marketplace partners, allowing rule groups to include up to 10 million domain indicators and 1 million IP addresses. Partners including Infoblox, Lumen, and ThreatSTOP are adding protections for high-risk domains, command-and-control blocking, and sanctions compliance. Managed rules from sellers like Check Point, Fortinet, Rapid7, and Trend Micro provide ready-to-deploy, continuously updated protections and are now available in additional regions.

🔒 Amazon EC2 now lets you control whether resources provisioned by managed instance offerings appear in console views and API list responses. New managed EC2 instances — provisioned by services such as Amazon EKS, Amazon ECS, AWS Lambda, and Amazon WorkSpaces — are hidden by default to better align with the shared responsibility model. You can adjust visibility settings via the EC2 console or the AWS CLI, affecting views like the EC2 console and describe-instances API results.

🧩 Amazon SageMaker AI now supports serverless model customization for Qwen3.5, enabling supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) of 4B, 9B, and 27B parameter models. With serverless customization, SageMaker handles infrastructure provisioning and training orchestration so teams can focus on data, evaluation, and domain adaptation while paying only for consumed resources. This capability is available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and EU (Ireland) and can be launched from SageMaker Studio or the SageMaker Python SDK.