All news in category "Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch"

Microsoft: Office 2016 and 2019 End Extended Support

🔔Microsoft reminded customers that Office 2016 and Office 2019 will reach the end of extended support on 14 October 2025. Organizations using Visio 2016/2019, Project 2016/2019, and related apps are urged to upgrade to avoid security, compliance, and performance issues because no further updates or fixes will be provided. Microsoft recommends migrating to Microsoft 365 Apps or selecting a perpetual release such as Office 2024 or Office LTSC 2024 depending on licensing and connectivity needs.

Amazon EventBridge Adds Customer-Managed KMS Support

🔐 Amazon EventBridge now supports AWS KMS customer managed keys for event bus rule filter patterns and input transformers. This lets you encrypt the logic that selects and modifies events with your own keys to meet security and compliance requirements while retaining full key control. The feature is available in all commercial AWS Regions and can be audited via AWS CloudTrail. There is no additional EventBridge charge, though standard AWS KMS pricing applies.

California Modernizes Public Services with Google Cloud

🚀 California is partnering with Google Cloud to modernize state and local services by applying AI, security, and infrastructure solutions. Agencies such as Covered California use Document AI, Assured Workloads, and AI-driven security to speed eligibility decisions and protect sensitive data. Universities including UCR and Caltech are using Vertex AI and AI-optimized HPC for research acceleration. Workspace, Gemini, and Agentspace are cited as productivity and information-management enablers.

AWS Budgets Adds Custom Time Periods for Project Funding

📊 AWS Budgets now supports custom time periods, letting teams define flexible start and end dates for a budget rather than relying on calendar-based cycles. This enables single-budget tracking for time-bound projects (for example, a three-month development sprint starting mid-month) and triggers alerts as spend approaches thresholds. The feature is available today in all AWS commercial Regions except the AWS GovCloud (US) and China Regions.

Why a Cisco Talos Incident Response Retainer Matters

🔒 A Cisco Talos Incident Response (IR) Retainer provides organizations with prioritized access to Talos' global threat intelligence and incident response specialists, combining proactive preparedness with rapid 24/7 mobilization. The retainer includes tailored IR plans, playbooks, readiness assessments, and tabletop exercises, plus proactive threat hunting using the PEAK Framework. Clients receive vendor-agnostic integration guidance, optional Cisco technology deployment, coordinated legal and PR support, and detailed post-incident reviews to reduce downtime and reputational harm.

Benchmarking Google Cloud C3 Machine Types for Trading

🔍 Google Cloud and consultancy 28Stone published benchmarks showing the C3 machine series delivers low-latency, low-jitter performance suited to electronic trading. Tests using DPDK and replayed CME Group equity pcaps reported decision latencies as low as 1.5 µs (P50) and 3.5 µs (P99) and demonstrated consistent profiles at up to 100× data rates. The results highlight sub‑50 µs end-to-end round-trip P99 performance, high throughput with up to 200 Gbps per VM networking, and network innovations such as Titanium offload and Cloud WAN layer‑2 connectivity.

AWS End User Messaging: CloudFormation Support for SMS

📩 AWS End User Messaging SMS now supports AWS CloudFormation, enabling customers to deploy and manage SMS resources using templates. Phone numbers, sender IDs, configuration sets, protection configurations, opt-out lists, resource policies, and phone pools can be provisioned and managed declaratively alongside other AWS resources. This support is available in all Regions where End User Messaging is offered, simplifying deployments and delivery pipelines.

AWS PCS Supports EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML Workloads

🔧 Amazon Web Services has added native support for EC2 Capacity Blocks in the Parallel Computing Service (PCS), enabling use of reserved EC2 instances directly within PCS Slurm clusters. This integration lets Capacity Blocks be associated with PCS compute node groups via an EC2 Launch Template, simplifying capacity planning for GPU‑based ML workloads. The feature is available in all Regions where both services are offered and aims to improve availability and predictability for cutting‑edge GPU jobs.

AWS Network Firewall Enhances Console Monitoring and TLS

🔒 AWS Network Firewall now delivers expanded console monitoring and enhanced TLS inspection capabilities to improve outbound security. The monitoring dashboard adds visibility into traffic to AWS services such as Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, and AWS Backup, including traffic sent over PrivateLink, and surfaces top source and destination IPs by packets and bytes. Customers can filter views by IP and protocol for targeted analysis. A new session holding feature for TLS Inspection prevents TCP/TLS establishment from reaching servers until SNI-based rules are evaluated, strengthening controls against malicious endpoints.

CrowdStrike Launches Threat AI: Agentic Threat Intel

🔍 CrowdStrike unveiled Threat AI, described as the industry’s first agentic threat intelligence system, built on the Falcon platform to reason, hunt, and act across adversary activity. The initial agents — a Malware Analysis Agent and a Hunt Agent — automate complex workflows like reversing, classification, retrohunting, and continuous threat hunting to surface actionable recommendations. CrowdStrike also released a Threat Intelligence Browser Extension for Chrome to provide intelligence in analysts’ workflows, aiming to accelerate investigations and help SOCs respond at machine speed.

CrowdStrike Secures AI Across the Enterprise with Partners

🔒 CrowdStrike describes how the Falcon platform delivers unified visibility and lifecycle defense across the full AI stack, from GPUs and training data to inference pipelines and SaaS agents. The post highlights integrations with NVIDIA, AWS, Intel, Dell, Meta, and Salesforce to extend protection into infrastructure, data, models, and applications. It also introduces agentic defense via Charlotte AI for autonomous triage and rapid response, and emphasizes governance controls to prevent data leaks and adversarial manipulation.

Falcon for IT Brings Risk-Based Patching to Falcon

🔒 Falcon for IT introduces Risk-based Patching to unite security and IT teams within the CrowdStrike Falcon platform. By combining Falcon Exposure Management telemetry, AI-powered patch scheduling, Patch Safety Scores, and sensor intelligence, the feature prioritizes vulnerabilities by real-world exploitability and reduces time to remediation. Ring-based deployments, smart rollout coordination, and pre-deployment safety checks help avoid system-breaking updates while accelerating fixes. Delivered through the existing lightweight Falcon agent, it replaces manual handoffs with a single, unified workflow.

Automating OIDC Client Secret Rotation for ALB on AWS

🔁 This AWS blog demonstrates how to automate OIDC client secret rotation for Application Load Balancer authentication using AWS Secrets Manager, AWS Lambda, and Amazon EventBridge. The solution securely stores IdP credentials (Auth0 in the example), schedules a Lambda handler to fetch and compare tokens, and updates Secrets Manager and ALB listener rules when changes occur. It reduces manual effort, limits plaintext credential exposure, and adds monitoring via CloudWatch alarms.

Multi-Region Key Replication in AWS Payment Cryptography

🔐 AWS introduces Multi-Region keys for AWS Payment Cryptography, a built-in option to automatically synchronize exportable symmetric payment keys from a primary Region to one or more replica Regions. You can choose account-level defaults or per-key replication targets, keep consistent key IDs across Regions, and rely on asynchronous replication with monitoring via new CloudTrail events. The feature improves availability and disaster recovery for global payment operations while preserving granular control over replication.

Microsoft Adds Copilot Chat to Microsoft 365 Office Apps

💬 Microsoft is rolling out Copilot Chat to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote for eligible Microsoft 365 business customers. Unlike Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Chat is web-grounded and uses only web data by default, though it is content-aware and tailors responses to the file you have open. Microsoft says the feature is included at no additional cost for qualifying licenses, and admins can opt out of automatic installs; organizations can purchase a Microsoft 365 Copilot license to unlock full access to organizational data.

CrowdStrike Unveils Agentic AI Platforms After Onum Deal

🤖 CrowdStrike is expanding its agentic AI strategy following its $290 million acquisition of Onum, introducing two initiatives designed to accelerate real-time telemetry and automate SOC workflows. The Agentic Security Platform builds an "enterprise graph" with a semantic data model that acts as a Rosetta Stone to normalize diverse telemetry and enable a global query and command engine. Agent Works provides a no-code environment to create, test, and deploy agentic systems, while the Agentic Security Workforce delivers mission-ready agents in Falcon sensors to automate repetitive analyst tasks and enforce data-protection controls across endpoints.

Amazon EKS Adds Community Add-Ons Catalog for GovCloud

🔒Amazon EKS now offers a curated catalog of community add-ons for AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. The catalog includes popular open-source components such as metrics-server, kube-state-metrics, cert-manager, prometheus-node-exporter, fluent-bit, and external-dns, all packaged, scanned, and validated for compatibility by EKS. Container images are hosted in an EKS-owned private ECR repository, and you can install and manage add-ons via the EKS Console, API, CLI, eksctl, or infrastructure-as-code tools like AWS CloudFormation.

AWS launches EC2 I7i storage-optimized instances globally

🚀 Amazon Web Services has announced the availability of high-performance, storage-optimized EC2 I7i instances in the South America (São Paulo) and Canada West (Calgary) regions. Powered by 5th-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and 3rd-generation AWS Nitro SSDs, these instances deliver up to 23% better compute and improved price performance versus I4i. I7i offers up to 45TB NVMe, lower latency, and enhanced real-time storage performance, with support for bare-metal sizes and up to 100Gbps networking for I/O-intensive, latency-sensitive workloads.

AWS FIS Adds EBS I/O Latency Injection for Testing

⚙️ Amazon EBS now provides a latency injection action in AWS Fault Injection Service (FIS) to simulate degraded I/O performance on EBS volumes as part of controlled fault injection experiments. The action reproduces real-world signals such as Amazon CloudWatch alarms and OS timeouts so teams can observe application behavior and validate recovery. Pre-defined templates are available in the EBS and FIS consoles, and experiments can be customized or combined with other actions to integrate into chaos engineering and CI workflows. The capability is available in all Regions where FIS is supported.

Amazon Lex Adds LLM-Based NLU for Eight New Languages

🚀 Amazon Lex now leverages large language models to augment the natural language understanding of deterministic conversational bots in eight additional languages: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Catalan, French, Italian, and German. The enhancement helps voice and chat bots parse complex utterances, tolerate spelling errors, and extract key details from verbose inputs so bots can fulfill customer requests. The capability is available in 10 commercial AWS Regions where Amazon Connect operates.