All news in category "Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch"

Amazon MSK Connect Expands to Ten More AWS Regions

🚀 Amazon MSK Connect is now available in ten additional AWS Regions — Jakarta, Hong Kong, Osaka, Melbourne, Milan, Zurich, Bahrain, UAE, Cape Town, and Tel Aviv. MSK Connect provides fully managed Kafka Connect clusters for deploying, monitoring, and scaling connectors to move data between Apache Kafka/Amazon MSK and external systems without provisioning infrastructure. The service supports both managed and self-managed Kafka clusters and is accessible via the MSK console and CLI.

Windows 10 End of Support: Guidance for Enterprises

🛡️ As of October 14, 2025, Microsoft has ended support for non‑LTSC releases of Windows 10, leaving installations without default security patches unless organizations purchase Extended Security Updates (ESUs). CrowdStrike advises inventorying assets, evaluating ESU costs, and prioritizing migration while ensuring continuous endpoint protection. The Falcon platform delivers cloud‑native detection, behavioral AI, and visibility across mixed Windows environments to help reduce risk during transition. Note that EDR complements but does not replace operating system updates.

AWS Expands Graviton4 M8g EC2 Instances to Regions

🚀 AWS announced that Amazon EC2 M8g instances, powered by Graviton4 processors, are now available in Europe (Paris), Asia Pacific (Osaka), Canada (Central), and the Middle East (Bahrain). The M8g family delivers up to 30% better performance versus Graviton3-based instances and offers larger sizes with up to 3× more vCPUs and memory. Built on the AWS Nitro System, these instances provide enhanced networking and EBS bandwidth for general-purpose workloads such as application servers, microservices, gaming servers, and caching fleets.

Stopping Living-off-the-Land Abuse of Trusted Tools

🔒 CrowdStrike highlights how attackers increasingly weaponize trusted software—RMM tools, built-in Windows utilities, and admin binaries—to evade detection and operate within networks. The Falcon platform layers behavioral IOAs, custom controls, and Exposure Management and now adds APEX, a machine-learning model that analyzes command-line syntax, parameters, process lineage, timing, and context to detect LOLbin abuse. APEX is generally available for Windows and aims to raise detection while reducing false positives.

Microsoft Advances Open Standards for Frontier AI Scale

🔧 Microsoft details OCP contributions to accelerate open-source infrastructure for frontier-scale AI, focusing on power, cooling, networking, security, and sustainability. It highlights innovations such as solid-state transformers, a power-stabilization paper with OpenAI and NVIDIA, and a next-generation HXU for liquid cooling. Networking efforts include ESUN and scale-up Ethernet workstreams, while security contributions introduce Caliptra 2.1, Adams Bridge 2.0, and L.O.C.K. The post also advances fleet lifecycle management, carbon accounting, and waste-heat reuse for globally deployable AI datacenters.

Agile, Fungible Data Centers for the AI Era: Standards

🚀 Google outlines designs for agile, fungible data centers to meet explosive AI demand, advocating modular, interoperable architectures and late-binding of facility resources. It highlights Project Deschutes liquid cooling, +/-400Vdc power proposals with Mt. Diablo side-car designs, and open efforts like Caliptra 2.0 and OCP L.O.C.K.. The post calls for community standards across power, cooling, telemetry, networking, and security to improve resilience, sustainability, and operational flexibility.

Google Introduces LLM-Evalkit for Prompt Engineering

🧭 LLM-Evalkit is an open-source, lightweight application from Google that centralizes and streamlines prompt engineering using Vertex AI SDKs. It provides a no-code interface for creating, versioning, testing, and benchmarking prompts while tracking objective performance metrics. The tool promotes a dataset-driven evaluation workflow—define the task, assemble representative test cases, and score outputs against clear metrics—to replace ad-hoc iteration and subjective comparisons. Documentation and a guided console tutorial are available to help teams adopt the framework and reproduce experiments.

Building a Lasting Security Culture at Microsoft Initiative

🔐 Microsoft frames security culture as a company-wide movement driven by people and operationalized through the Secure Future Initiative (SFI). The company overhauled employee education—launching the Microsoft Security Academy, refreshing the Security Foundations series, and requiring three annual sessions (90 minutes total)—to address AI-enabled attacks, deepfakes, and identity threats. Leadership mandates, linked compensation, measurable training outcomes (99% completion; rising satisfaction and relevancy scores), new identity and AI guides, Deputy CISOs in engineering, and embedded DevSecOps are highlighted as evidence of measurable cultural change.

Google transitions to cryptographic media sanitization

🔐 Google will transition in November 2025 from overwrite-based media sanitization to cryptographic erasure, using default encryption to render data unrecoverable by securely deleting encryption keys rather than overwriting drives. Recognized in NIST SP 800-88, this method is faster and better suited to modern storage technologies. Google says it will apply a layered, defense-in-depth model with independent verification, key rotations, and protections for device secrets to maintain strong safeguards.

Getting Started with Chaos Engineering on Google Cloud

⚙️ This post introduces the fundamentals of chaos engineering and explains why deliberately injecting controlled failures helps teams build more resilient cloud-native systems. It covers core principles — such as defining a steady-state hypothesis, limiting blast radius, replicating realistic failure modes, and automating experiments — and translates them into practical steps for experiment design, fault injection, probing, and rollback. The article recommends using Chaos Toolkit and points to Google Cloud–specific recipes to help engineers begin safely and iteratively.

Microsoft Investigates Microsoft 365 Access Outage

⚠️ Microsoft is investigating an ongoing incident that is preventing some customers from accessing Microsoft 365 applications. The issue has been tagged as an incident in the admin center while Redmond reviews telemetry and recent service changes to identify the root cause. Microsoft first acknowledged the problem at 05:06 AM UTC and said it continued analysis nearly four hours later to develop a fix. Impact appears limited to users served by the affected infrastructure.

Amazon QuickSight Adds Expanded Font Customization

🔤 Amazon QuickSight now extends font customization to data labels and axes across supported charts, complementing existing controls for titles, subtitles, legends, and table headers. Authors can set font family, pixel size, color, and styling such as bold, italics, and underline for analyses, dashboards, reports, and embedded scenarios. The update improves branding alignment and readability on large displays and is available in all supported regions.

Varonis Interceptor: Multimodal AI Email Defense Platform

🛡️ Varonis introduces Interceptor, an AI-native email security solution that combines multimodal AI—visual, linguistic, and behavioral models—to detect advanced phishing, BEC, and social engineering. It augments or replaces API-based filters with a phishing sandbox that pre-analyzes newly registered domains and URLs and a lightweight browser extension for multichannel protection. Integrated with the Varonis Data Security Platform, Interceptor aims to reduce false positives, accelerate detection of zero-hour threats, and stop breaches earlier in the attack chain.

SageMaker AI Projects Adds Custom ML Templates from S3

🛠️ Amazon Web Services announced that SageMaker AI Projects can now provision custom ML project templates stored in Amazon S3. Administrators can define and manage standardized end-to-end project templates in SageMaker AI Studio so data scientists can create projects that follow organizational patterns and automated workflows. The feature is available in all AWS Regions where SageMaker AI Projects is offered.

AWS Resource Explorer Enables Immediate Regional Discovery

🔍 AWS Resource Explorer now provides immediate access to resource search within each AWS Region without requiring prior activation. To start searching you need, at minimum, permissions granted by the AWS Resource Explorer Read Only Access or AWS Read Only Access managed policies, and you can discover resources via the Resource Explorer console, Unified Search, or AWS CLI/SDKs. To index the full inventory, including historical backfill and automatic updates, complete Resource Explorer setup so it can create a service-linked role. You can also enable cross-Region search with a single console click or the new CreateResourceExplorerSetup API, and the feature is available at no additional cost in supported Regions.

AWS launches EC2 High Memory U7i-12TB in Mumbai region

🚀 Amazon EC2 High Memory U7i-12tb instances with 12TiB of DDR5 memory are now available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) region as of Oct 13, 2025. The u7i-12tb.224xlarge is powered by custom fourth‑generation Intel Xeon Scalable (Sapphire Rapids) processors, offers 896 vCPUs, and supports up to 100Gbps for both EBS and network throughput plus ENA Express. These instances are targeted at mission‑critical in‑memory databases such as SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL Server, enabling higher transaction throughput, faster data loading, and shorter backup windows for large-scale deployments.

Windows 11 Media Creation Tool Fails on Windows 10

⚠️ Microsoft says the Windows 11 Media Creation Tool (MCT) version 26100.6584 released on September 29, 2025, may close unexpectedly on Windows 10 22H2 devices without showing an error. The company is working on a fix and recommends downloading a Disk Image (ISO) for x64 systems as a temporary workaround. Microsoft also notes the MCT is not supported on Windows 10 ARM64 machines, following earlier ARM64 compatibility problems after the Windows 11 25H2 rollout.

Amazon Bedrock AgentCore GA: Secure Agent Platform

🔐 Amazon Bedrock AgentCore is now generally available, offering an agentic platform to build, deploy, and operate agents securely at scale without infrastructure management. It adds VPC support, extended eight-hour runtimes, session isolation, and initial Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol support. Identity, Gateway, and Observability features provide secure authorization, tool discovery, and CloudWatch/OTEL monitoring.

Apple Doubles Top Bug Bounty to $2M, Bonuses Possible

🔐 Apple has increased the top award in its Apple Security Bounty program to $2m for exploit chains that emulate sophisticated mercenary spyware. Bonuses for Lockdown Mode bypasses and vulnerabilities found in beta software can more than double that payout, potentially exceeding $5m. Apple also raised many category rewards — including $100,000 for a Gatekeeper bypass and $1m for broad unauthorized iCloud access — and introduced a Target Flags initiative to speed and standardize exploitability demonstrations.

Amazon CloudWatch Adds Generative AI Observability

🔍 Amazon CloudWatch is generally available with Generative AI Observability, providing end-to-end telemetry for AI applications and AgentCore-managed agents. It expands monitoring beyond model runtime to include Built-in Tools, Gateways, Memory, and Identity, surfacing latency, token usage, errors, and performance across components. The capability integrates with orchestration frameworks like LangChain, LangGraph, and Strands Agents, and works with existing CloudWatch features and pricing for underlying telemetry.