All news in category "Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch"

Unit 42 Earns NCSC Enhanced Level Incident Response

🔒 Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 has been added to the UK's NCSC Cyber Incident Response scheme at the Enhanced Level, demonstrating certified capability to manage the most complex and impactful cyber incidents. The assurance verifies structured, government-benchmarked processes, strong investigative expertise, and a customer-focused retainer model tailored to regulatory and operational needs. This recognition underscores Unit 42's role in helping organisations reduce dwell time, contain threats faster, and strengthen long-term resilience.

Mr. Cooper and Google Cloud Build Multi-Agent AI Team

🤖 Mr. Cooper partnered with Google Cloud to develop CIERA, a modular agentic AI framework that assembles specialized agents to support mortgage servicing representatives and customers. The design assigns distinct roles — orchestration, task execution, data retrieval, memory, and evaluation — while keeping humans in the loop for verification and personalization. Built on Vertex AI, CIERA aims to reduce research time, lower average handling time, and preserve trust and compliance in regulated workflows.

Stability AI Image Services Now Available in Amazon Bedrock

🖼️ Amazon Bedrock now includes Stability AI Image Services, a suite of nine specialized image-editing tools available via the Bedrock API. The offering splits into Edit tools (Remove Background, Erase Object, Search and Replace, Search and Recolor, Inpaint) and Control tools (Structure, Sketch, Style Guide, Style Transfer). It is currently supported in US West (Oregon), US East (N. Virginia), and US East (Ohio), and is intended to accelerate professional creative workflows with granular edit control.

Network Performance Whitepapers: Retransmits, MTU, and PPS

🔍 This post introduces the third installment in Google Cloud’s Network Performance Decoded series, summarizing three whitepapers that examine TCP retransmission tuning, the effects of headers and MTU on effective throughput, and techniques to measure packets-per-second with netperf. The guidance highlights practical kernel tuning (for example, rto_min and thin linear timeouts), how protocol and cloud-specific headers reduce payload efficiency, and rigorous netperf methodologies for sizing tests and correcting skew when measuring PPS. While examples reference Google Cloud features such as Protective ReRoute, the recommendations are broadly applicable to cloud deployments seeking improved responsiveness and accurate benchmarking.

Partnering with Google Cloud MSSPs to Modernize SecOps

🔒 Google Cloud presents its certified MSSP ecosystem as a way to modernize security operations by combining partner expertise with Google Cloud Security products. Partners accelerate deployments and migrations, shorten time to value, and augment limited internal teams with specialized talent and AI-enabled tooling such as Google Security Operations and Mandiant. By providing scalable, 24/7 managed detection and response, MSSPs can reduce manual alerts, lower operational costs, and protect workloads across on-premises and multicloud environments.

Seattle Children’s Uses AI to Accelerate Pediatric Care

🤖 Seattle Children’s partnered with Google Cloud to build Pathway Assistant, a multimodal AI chatbot that turns thousands of pediatric clinical pathway PDFs into conversational, searchable guidance. Using Vertex AI and Gemini, the assistant extracts JSON metadata, parses diagrams and flowcharts, and returns cited answers in seconds. The tool logs clinician feedback to BigQuery and stores source documents in Cloud Storage, enabling continuous improvement of documentation and metadata.

Inside Fairwater: Microsoft's New Frontier AI Datacenter

🚀 Microsoft unveiled Fairwater, a purpose-built AI datacenter in Wisconsin and sister sites in Norway and the UK, designed to operate as a single, global-scale supercomputer. The facility deploys interconnected racks of NVIDIA GB200 servers (72 GPUs per rack) and claims 10× the performance of the world’s fastest supercomputer. It combines closed-loop liquid cooling, exabyte-scale storage and an AI WAN to enable distributed training and large-scale inference across Azure.

Microsoft Named Leader in 2025 Gartner IIoT Report

🔷 Microsoft was named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Global Industrial IIoT Platforms, highlighting its industrial cloud portfolio. Azure’s adaptive cloud—anchored by Azure IoT, Azure Arc, Azure Digital Twins, and Microsoft Fabric—is positioned to unify cloud-to-edge data, enable real‑time intelligence, and scale AI-driven operations. The platform emphasizes security with Microsoft Defender for IoT, Microsoft Sentinel, and Microsoft Entra, while enabling brownfield integration and partner-led solutions to accelerate industrial modernization.

Step Functions: Data Sources and Metrics for Distributed Map

⚙️ AWS Step Functions now expands Distributed Map input sources and adds visibility metrics. Distributed Map can now iterate S3 objects via S3ListObjectsV2, read AWS Athena data manifests and Parquet files directly, and extract arrays from JSON stored in S3 or passed as state input. New observability metrics — Approximate Open Map Runs Count, Open Map Run Limit, and Approximate Map Runs Backlog Size — provide operational insight. These features are available in all commercial AWS Regions; enable Distributed Map mode in the Step Functions console and consult the developer guide for examples.

Route Cloudflare Tunnel Traffic by Hostname, Not IP

🔒 Cloudflare now lets administrators route traffic to a Cloudflare Tunnel by hostname or domain, removing the need to track changing IP addresses. By binding hostnames or wildcard domains to tunnels and writing Access or Gateway policies, teams can enforce per-resource zero-trust rules and secure egress without touching IP lists. Gateway uses synthetic initial IPs to tag hostname intent at Layer 4, map traffic back to private IPs, and forward it through the correct tunnel.

AWS Bedrock Adds OpenAI Open‑Weight Models in Eight Regions

🚀 AWS has expanded availability of OpenAI open weight models on AWS Bedrock to eight additional AWS Regions worldwide. The update brings the models to US East (N. Virginia), Asia Pacific (Tokyo, Mumbai), Europe (Stockholm, Ireland, London, Milan) and South America (São Paulo), alongside existing US West (Oregon) support. This broader footprint aims to lower latency, improve model performance and help customers meet data residency requirements. To get started, use the Amazon Bedrock console or consult the documentation.

Amazon Bedrock Adds Four Qwen3 Open-Weight Models Now

🤖 Amazon Web Services added four Qwen3 open-weight foundation models to Amazon Bedrock as fully managed, serverless offerings. The lineup—Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct, Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct, Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct-2507, and Qwen3-32B—covers both dense and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures. The coder variants specialize in agentic coding, function calling, and tool use, while the 235B and 32B models provide general reasoning and efficient dense computation. These models are available now across multiple AWS regions, enabling developers to build advanced AI applications without managing infrastructure.

OpenAI Open-Weight Models Now in Eight More AWS Regions

🚀 AWS has expanded availability of OpenAI open weight models on Amazon Bedrock to eight additional regions. The update adds US East (N. Virginia), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Europe (Ireland), South America (São Paulo), Europe (London), and Europe (Milan) to the previously supported US West (Oregon). This broader regional coverage reduces network latency, helps meet data residency preferences, and makes it easier for customers to deploy AI-powered applications closer to their users. Customers can access the models through the Amazon Bedrock console and supporting documentation to get started.

DeepSeek-V3.1 Available as Fully Managed in Bedrock

🔍 DeepSeek-V3.1 is now available as a fully managed foundation model in Amazon Bedrock, offering an open-weight option designed for enterprise deployment. The model supports a selectable 'thinking' mode for step-by-step analysis and a faster non-thinking mode for quicker replies, with improved multilingual accuracy and reduced hallucinations. Enhanced tool-calling, transparent reasoning, and strong coding and analytical performance make it well suited for building AI agents, automating workflows, and tackling complex technical tasks. DeepSeek-V3.1 is available in US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo, Mumbai), and Europe (London, Stockholm).

Amazon Lex: confirmation and currency slots in 10 languages

🤖 Amazon Lex now supports built-in confirmation and currency slot types in 10 additional languages: Portuguese, Catalan, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, and Korean. These built-in slots normalize varied user phrasing—mapping acknowledgements to 'Yes', 'No', 'Don't know', or 'Maybe' and converting currency expressions into structured formats such as 'USD 1.00'—to simplify multi-lingual conversational flows. The feature is available in all commercial AWS Regions where Amazon Lex operates and can improve chatbots and contact-center interactions.

Notepad Adds Free AI Writing Tools on Copilot+ Windows 11

📝 Microsoft is adding free AI-powered text features to Notepad on Copilot+ PCs running Windows 11, rolling out now to Windows Insiders in the Canary and Dev channels on Notepad version 11.2508.28.0. The new Summarize, Write, and Rewrite tools were previously part of Microsoft 365 subscriptions but are available without an extra subscription on Copilot+ devices. Features support English only; subscribers can switch between local and cloud models while unsigned users use the local model. Users may disable the AI options in settings or uninstall the updated Notepad to use classic notepad.exe. Paint and Snipping Tool also received recent updates.

Google Cloud's Differentiated AI Stack Fuels Startups

🚀 Google Cloud highlights how its differentiated AI tech stack is accelerating startup innovation worldwide, with nine of the top ten AI labs, most AI unicorns, and more than 60% of generative AI startups using its platform. Startups are leveraging Vertex AI, TPUs, multimodal models like Veo 3 and Gemini, plus services such as AI Studio and GKE to build agents, generative media, medical tools, and developer platforms. Programs like the Google for Startups Cloud Program provide credits, mentorship, and engineering support to help founders scale.

Palo Alto Acknowledges Browser-Malware Risks, Validates LMR

🔍 SquareX’s Last Mile Reassembly (LMR) research, disclosed at DEF CON 32, shows how attackers split and reassemble malware inside the browser to evade Secure Web Gateways (SWGs). Palo Alto Networks has become the first major SASE vendor to publicly acknowledge this class of browser-assembled evasive attacks and announced enhancements to Prisma Browser. SquareX says LMR and related Data Splicing techniques exploit channels like WebRTC and gRPC, bypassing traditional SWG and DLP controls and underscoring the need for browser-native security.

Alex Ryan: From Zero Chill to Quiet Confidence at Talos

🔒 In this Humans of Talos interview, Alex Ryan, an Incident Commander with Cisco Talos Incident Response, reflects on her unconventional path from liberal arts degrees to a career in cybersecurity and threat intelligence. She describes the technical and emotional realities of incident response—triaging IOCs, conducting forensic analysis, and quickly building customer trust—while managing high stress and business risk. Ryan also discusses recovering from burnout after parenthood, learning to set boundaries, and how a supportive team helps sustain long-term performance.

Amazon OpenSearch Serverless Adds Disk-Optimized Vectors

🔍 Amazon has added disk-optimized vector storage to OpenSearch Serverless, offering a lower-cost alternative to memory-optimized vectors while maintaining equivalent accuracy and recall. The disk-optimized option may introduce slightly higher latency, so it is best suited for semantic search, recommendation systems, and other AI search scenarios that do not require sub-millisecond responses. As a fully managed service, OpenSearch Serverless continues to automatically scale compute capacity (measured in OCUs) to match workload demands.