All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔧 Amazon RDS now permits up to four storage modifications per database instance within a rolling 24-hour window. These changes let you increase size, change volume type, and adjust performance without incurring downtime, and a new modification can begin once the previous optimization completes. The feature is automatically enabled across Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, MariaDB, MySQL, Db2, Oracle, and SQL Server in all commercial AWS Regions and AWS GovCloud (US).

🛡️ Microsoft announces Defender Experts Threat Intelligence and expands Defender Experts MDR to include third-party and multi-cloud coverage. The expert-led services translate global signals into prioritized, environment-specific guidance and integrate Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence into the Defender portal for real-time use across detection, investigation, response, and hunting. Defender Experts MDR Plan 2 extends managed detection and response beyond Microsoft products using Microsoft Sentinel, enabling experts to follow threats across heterogeneous estates. These offerings aim to shorten the time from signal to decisive action and will be showcased at Black Hat.

🔎 Google Cloud outlines how to integrate Gemini Enterprise telemetry into BigQuery to enable scalable analytics and governance. The article explains pre-computed dashboards, streaming log sinks, and five partitioned telemetry tables for prompts, model responses, user activity, and audit logs. It highlights BigQuery Conversational Analytics, auto-generated schema documentation, and techniques to build executive dashboards and compliance workflows.

🧭 AlloyDB introduces native AI Functions to solve tokenization issues for logographical languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. By calling Gemini models from SQL via ai.generate(), developers can perform in-database segmentation, stop-word removal, and embedding generation without ETL pipelines or external services. The approach uses stored-procedure batching, generated columns for search vectors and embeddings, and RUM plus ScaNN indexes to enable fast hybrid lexical and semantic search.

🛡️ AWS Glue now offers the SAP OData connector and zero-ETL integrations in AWS GovCloud (US-West) and AWS GovCloud (US-East). These integrations support Amazon DynamoDB, Salesforce, and SAP OData as sources and let regulated customers replicate data into Amazon Redshift, Amazon S3, or other destinations without custom pipelines. The fully managed zero-ETL option reduces operational overhead and engineering effort by providing a no-code interface to set up continuous data replication and maintain up-to-date replicas for analytics.

🛠️ Amazon OpenSearch Service integrates with the Agent Toolkit for AWS, enabling AI coding agents like Claude Code, Kiro, and Cursor to build, manage, and query OpenSearch Service domains and OpenSearch Serverless collections. The integration uses the AWS MCP server to execute API calls and the curated amazon-opensearch-service skill to translate natural-language requests into capabilities. It supports migration, operations, search, log analytics, and trace analytics across managed domains and serverless collections with no infrastructure changes and no additional charge.

🛡️ This post from Mandiant highlights how publicly exposed serverless applications — often unauthenticated by design — are frequent targets for application-level attacks like LFI/RFI and command injection. It explains exploitation paths including file retrieval and service account token exfiltration, and demonstrates attack examples against Cloud Run Python functions. The article provides actionable hardening guidance such as using dedicated service accounts with least privilege, isolating public services in separate projects, enforcing S‑SDLC practices, and deploying Cloud Armor WAF and Layer 7 load balancing for centralized protection.

🔍 Fortinet reinforced its decade-long partnership with INTERPOL at the INTERPOL Partners’ Conference in Lyon, stressing the need for faster, trust-based intelligence sharing to counter AI-accelerated cybercrime. Panel discussions highlighted how AI and agentic systems amplify threats across phishing, fraud, and cybercrime-as-a-service while underscoring the role of FortiGuard Labs in supporting coordinated disruption. The piece calls for sustained public-private collaboration, shared detection methods, and resource support for global law enforcement.

🛈 Amazon RDS for Db2 is now available in Asia Pacific (Thailand), Asia Pacific (Malaysia), Asia Pacific (Taipei), Mexico (Central), and Canada West (Calgary). The service simplifies setup, operation, and scaling of Db2 databases with automated configuration and optional Multi-AZ synchronous replication for high availability. Licensing options include hourly pay-as-you-go from the AWS Marketplace, Bring Your Own License (BYOL), and the Db2 Community Edition for development and test use. Documentation and pricing pages provide further details.

🛠️ AWS Lambda now supports referencing code directly from your own Amazon S3 buckets using self-managed code storage, removing the prior requirement for Lambda to copy deployment packages into Lambda-managed storage. This change eliminates the previous 75GB default storage constraint (now raised to 300GB) and can reduce function activation time by avoiding the copy step. No additional Lambda charges apply; you pay standard S3 storage and any applicable data transfer fees.

🔒 Microsoft will make passkeys the default authentication method for cloud-hosted Entra ID, beginning a staged rollout on September 1, 2026, and ending Microsoft-provided SMS/voice MFA on February 1, 2027. The change aims to reduce credential-based attacks by replacing phishable one-time codes with device-bound biometric or PIN-based credentials. Enterprises must prepare by auditing SMS/voice users, enabling passkeys and security keys, and updating recovery and device management practices.

🛡️ This monthly AWS Security digest highlights new features, compliance updates, hands-on samples, and workshops. It covers identity and access management, threat intelligence, network security, AI security tooling, and multi-account governance. Authors provide guidance and code examples for topics like restricting console access to trusted networks, securing multi-tenant AI agents, preventing data exfiltration, and managing organization-scale migrations.

🚀 AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS) now recovers AWS-based workloads faster by skipping unnecessary preparation steps for source servers running on Amazon EC2. This optimization can reduce recovery time by up to 65% for Windows and up to 40% for Linux, while still automatically applying networking, drivers, and licensing. Administrators can enable faster recovery across an account or on a per-server basis and change settings as needed. The feature is available in all Regions offering AWS DRS at no additional cost.

🔧 AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS) now supports the Amazon EBS volume initialization rate to accelerate restored volume performance during drills and recoveries. When DRS creates volumes from snapshots, data loads from Amazon S3 in the background and uninitialized blocks can show slower I/O; setting a volume initialization rate on your DRS-managed EC2 launch template lets DRS apply that rate automatically at recovery. This preserves performance for I/O-intensive workloads and is retained across template updates; if the rate cannot be applied, DRS still completes the recovery to avoid blocking operations. Support is available in all Regions where the EBS initialization rate is offered, and charges apply per GB based on snapshot size and your chosen rate.

📌 Amazon CloudWatch now offers a lookup processor that enriches log events by matching log fields against uploaded CSV lookup tables within CloudWatch Pipelines. You can map reference data—such as IP-to-team, user IDs, or product codes—to automatically add metadata at ingestion, improving queries, dashboards, and alarms without external processing. The feature is available in all commercial AWS regions that support CloudWatch Pipelines and is configurable via the Console, CLI, or SDKs.

🔔 Amazon Redshift is generally available with two new RG instance sizes: rg.large and rg.12xlarge. These Graviton-powered instances promise up to 2.4x faster query performance than prior RA3 instances while reducing price per vCPU by about 30%, and they are available on the current P202 track. Migration from existing RA3 clusters is supported via Snapshot and Restore, Elastic Resize, or Classic Resize, and the instances are offered with On-Demand and 1- or 3-year Reserved options with No Upfront payment.

🛠️ The AWS Lambda console now offers a one-click setup prompt that configures coding agents with AWS Serverless skills and the Serverless Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, embedding serverless best practices from the start. The prompt appears throughout the Lambda console for new and returning developers and streamlines agent setup by instructing installation of Agent Toolkit for AWS components. It references a Lambda agent setup guide with commands for Claude Code, Kiro, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Codex, Devin Desktop, and OpenCode, plus three specialized Lambda skills and Serverless MCP server configuration. Guidance to connect local AWS authentication is included when needed.

🔔 AWS has made new Amazon EC2 instance families (M8in, M8idn, M8ib, M8idb) available in US East (Ohio), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo). These sixth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor–based instances deliver up to 43% higher performance and include the latest sixth-generation AWS Nitro cards. M8in/M8idn provide up to 600 Gbps network bandwidth for network-intensive workloads, while M8ib/M8idb offer up to 300 Gbps EBS bandwidth for storage-heavy applications. The instances are available across multiple regions and purchasing options including Savings Plans, On-Demand, and Spot.

🔒 Security Hub now adds native AI workload protection and Microsoft Azure monitoring to centralize enterprise security across clouds. It discovers Azure resources, evaluates posture against CIS benchmarks, and prioritizes findings alongside AWS signals using the same formats and workflows. New GuardDuty AI Protection detects anomalous model invocations and cost-harvesting, while AI-powered investigations accelerate triage. A continuous AI inventory catalogs models and agents across accounts, and Security Hub Extended integrates 21 curated partners to broaden coverage.

🔒 AWS IAM Identity Center has achieved FedRAMP Class C authorization and is now in scope for the US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), and US West (Oregon) Regions. This allows organizations to use the service to enable workforce access to AWS accounts and applications that require FedRAMP Class C compliance. The announcement reiterates that the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) standardizes security assessment and continuous monitoring for cloud services and that IAM Identity Center is the recommended AWS service for managing workforce access. Additional compliance and product guidance is available in the AWS documentation and user guides.