All news in category "Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch"

Google for Startups Accelerator: AI First MENA & Turkey

🚀 Today Google announced 14 startups selected for the Google for Startups Accelerator: AI First program serving the Middle East, North Africa, and Turkey. The cohort addresses challenges across finance, real estate, healthcare, industrial safety, TradeTech, and education, and will receive targeted mentorship, technical training, and product and business support. Participants include Abwab.ai, COGNNA, Distichain, xBites, and Navatech, and the program emphasizes responsible AI to accelerate regional scaling and commercialization.

AWS Transfer Family Now Available in Taipei Region

🚀 AWS announced that AWS Transfer Family is now available in the Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region, supporting SFTP, FTP, FTPS and AS2 for managed file transfers. The service delivers fully managed ingress and egress to Amazon S3 and Amazon EFS, and integrates with event-driven automation to streamline file-processing workflows. This regional availability helps customers modernize and migrate business-to-business file exchanges to AWS while reducing operational overhead.

AWS Adds R8i and R8i-flex Instances in New Regions

🚀 AWS today expanded availability of EC2 R8i and R8i‑flex instances to Asia Pacific (Malaysia, Singapore) and Europe (Frankfurt). These instances use custom Intel Xeon 6 processors exclusive to AWS and deliver up to 15% better price‑performance and 2.5× more memory bandwidth versus prior Intel‑based generations. R8i targets large, memory‑intensive workloads with 13 sizes (including two bare‑metal and a new 96xlarge) and SAP certification at 142,100 aSAPS, while R8i‑flex offers common memory‑optimized sizes from large to 16xlarge for cost-efficient right‑sizing.

CrowdStrike Falcon: Building an Agentic Security Platform

🚀 The CrowdStrike Falcon fall release reframes the platform as an Agentic Security Platform, introducing four core innovations: Enterprise Graph, Charlotte AI AgentWorks, the Agent Collaboration framework (powered by MCP), and an AI-native console. Enterprise Graph unifies telemetry into a real-time, AI-ready data layer to give humans and agents shared context. Charlotte AI AgentWorks delivers a no-code environment to design, test, deploy, and govern mission-specific security agents at scale, while MCP enables secure, orchestrated multi-agent collaboration.

OpenSearch Star-Tree Index Speeds Aggregations for Analytics

⚡ OpenSearch introduces the Star-Tree Index, an opt-in index type that pre-aggregates data at ingestion to enable sub-second responses for frequent high-cardinality and multi-dimensional aggregations such as terms, histogram, and range. The feature is designed for real-time analytics and requires no query syntax changes; OpenSearch automatically routes supported queries to the optimized path. Early benchmarks indicate markedly faster aggregation performance on large datasets with minimal impact to ingestion throughput. Available in regions that support OpenSearch 3.1 and enabled at index creation via composite index settings.

OpenSearch Adds Derived Source Feature to Reduce Storage

🔧 Amazon OpenSearch Service announced support for Derived Source, an opt-in feature that lets you omit persisting the document _source and reconstruct it dynamically when needed. The capability, available with OpenSearch 3.1, reduces domain storage by skipping stored _source fields while still supporting search, get, mget, reindex, and update operations. Enable Derived Source at index creation using composite index settings.

Amazon S3 Batch Operations: Manage Objects by Bucket

📦 Amazon S3 Batch Operations now allows users to target all objects within an S3 bucket, or refine selection by prefix, suffix, creation date, or storage class directly from the AWS Management Console. Instead of providing a manifest, customers can specify these filters when creating a job and S3 will apply the chosen operation to every matching object and produce a detailed completion report. Typical use cases include copying between buckets, restoring archived data from Glacier classes, and computing checksums for datasets. The capability is available in all AWS Regions and can also be accessed via the AWS CLI or SDK.

Amazon GuardDuty Protection Plans and Threat Detection

🔐 Amazon GuardDuty centralizes continuous threat detection across AWS using AI/ML and integrated threat intelligence. It offers optional protection plans—S3, EKS, Runtime Monitoring, Malware Protection for EC2 and S3, RDS, and Lambda—that extend detections to service-specific telemetry and runtime behaviors. Built-in Extended Threat Detection correlates signals into high-confidence attack sequences and maps findings to MITRE ATT&CK, providing prioritized remediation guidance.

Amazon SageMaker HyperPod: Slurm Health Agent Now GA

🩺 Amazon announces general availability of the SageMaker HyperPod health monitoring agent for Slurm clusters. The agent runs continuously on GPU- and Trainium-based nodes to perform passive background checks, detect hardware faults (for example, unresponsive GPUs and NVLink errors), and mark and replace unhealthy nodes automatically. It supports automatic reboots and coordinates with Slurm job auto-resume so training can continue from the last checkpoint, reducing manual intervention and downtime.

Amazon OpenSearch Service Adds AI-Powered Forecasting

📈 Amazon now lets customers generate AI-powered forecasts and visualizations from time-series data indexed into Amazon OpenSearch Service domains. Forecasts can enhance insights into infrastructure utilization, application and business metrics, website traffic, and system performance to help anticipate upcoming changes. You can set up forecasts directly from OpenSearch dashboards or the OpenSearch UI, and no data science or AI expertise is required. The feature is available in all regions that support OpenSearch 3.1+ domains.

Microsoft: Exchange Server 2016/2019 End Support Soon

⚠️ Microsoft has warned that Exchange Server 2016 and Exchange Server 2019 will reach end of extended support on October 14, 2025. After that date Microsoft will stop providing technical support, including bug fixes, time zone updates, and security patches, which could increase exposure to vulnerabilities. Administrators are advised to migrate to Exchange Online or upgrade to Exchange Server Subscription Edition, with documented migration and upgrade paths available.

Cloudflare integrates CrowdStrike Falcon Fusion SOAR

🔗 Cloudflare announced an integration between the Cloudflare One SASE platform and CrowdStrike Falcon Fusion SOAR, delivering two out‑of‑the‑box connectors for Zero Trust and Email Security. The prebuilt actions exposed in the CrowdStrike Content Library automate common tasks—searching messages, updating allow/block lists, adjusting access policies, and revoking tokens—to reduce manual investigation and accelerate remediation. Customers can chain Cloudflare actions with Falcon Fusion playbooks via a drag‑and‑drop editor to enable bidirectional containment across network, email, and endpoints. The integration supports Logpush to CrowdStrike HTTP ingest and can be enabled from both vendor consoles, with APIs and custom playbooks available for tailoring workflows.

Microsoft to Auto-Install 365 Copilot on Windows in Oct

📥 Microsoft will automatically install the Microsoft 365 Copilot app on Windows devices that already have Microsoft 365 desktop apps beginning in early October, with rollout completing by mid-November 2025. The app will be placed in the Start menu and enabled by default, but administrators can opt out via the Apps Admin Center. Systems in the EEA are excluded, and Microsoft advises IT to notify helpdesk teams and users beforehand to reduce confusion and support requests.

Amazon Connect Cases Adds Date Filters to List View

📅 Amazon Connect Cases now supports date range filters in the case list view, enabling managers and agents to narrow case lists by creation, modification, or upcoming SLA windows. Users can filter cases created in the last 30 days, view items modified in the past 24 hours, or surface cases with potential SLA breaches in the next two days for proactive triage. Amazon Connect Cases is available in multiple AWS regions and documentation is provided to get started.

Azure Container Storage v2.0.0: NVMe Boosts Kubernetes

⚡ Azure today released Azure Container Storage v2.0.0, a performance-first update that delivers up to 7× higher IOPS, 4× lower latency, and improved resource efficiency for Kubernetes stateful workloads. The release adds built-in support for local NVMe drives, removes prior pricing tiers for large pools, and is available as an open-source local CSI driver for non-AKS clusters. Optimized for storage- and GPU-optimized VM families, the update also enables single-node deployments and integrates with KAITO to speed AI model loading and scaling.

Why Hybrid Mesh Firewalls Are the Future — Fortinet

🛡️ Fortinet argues that hybrid mesh firewalls (HMF) are now the baseline for modern enterprise security, unifying hardware, virtual, cloud-native and FWaaS instances under a centralized management plane. The post highlights FortiGate appliances running a single OS (FortiOS) and custom ASICs as the foundation for consistent policy, high-performance inspection, and fabric-wide telemetry. It frames HMF as essential for SASE integration and scalable, consistent enforcement across clouds, branches and data centers.

Amazon OpenSearch Service adds OpenSearch 3.1 for vectors

🚀 Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports OpenSearch 3.1, bringing targeted improvements for vector-driven and traditional search workloads. The release bundles Lucene 10 for optimized vector field indexing, faster indexing times, reduced index sizes, sparse indexing, and vector quantization to lower memory usage. It also improves range query and high-cardinality aggregation latency and introduces a new Search Relevance Workbench for iterative quality testing. Additional vector search enhancements include Z-score normalization for more reliable hybrid search and memory-optimized Faiss support; OpenSearch 3.1 is available in all AWS Regions.

Stop Waiting on NVD: Get Real-Time Vulnerability Alerts

🛡️SecAlerts provides real-time vulnerability alerts that avoid the publication delays commonly associated with NVD by aggregating signals from 100+ sources including vendors, researchers, forums and blogs. The service uses three core components — Stacks (software inventories and SBOMs), Channels (Email, Slack, Teams, Webhook) and Alerts (custom filters for Severity, Known Exploited, EPSS, Trending) — to deliver only relevant notifications. A central Dashboard surfaces affected software, extended metadata and reference links, while Properties enable multi-tenant views useful for MSPs and departments.

Check Point Named Leader in 2025 IDC MarketScape Report

🔒 Check Point has been named a Leader in the 2025 IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Enterprise Hybrid Firewalls, reflecting the maturity of its Hybrid Mesh Firewall capabilities. The recognition highlights the company's focus on unifying, automating and simplifying security operations at scale. IDC reports the firewall market reached $12.3 billion in 2024, underscoring the importance of resilient, centralized protection. Enterprises face wider attack surfaces and operational complexity that such platforms aim to mitigate.

AWS Organizations adds Account State field for members

🛈 AWS Organizations introduces a new State field in the console and APIs (DescribeAccount, ListAccounts, ListAccountsForParent) to provide more granular lifecycle visibility for member accounts. The console Status field has been replaced by State, while both Status and State remain available in APIs until September 9, 2026. New state values include SUSPENDED, PENDING_CLOSURE, and CLOSED (within the 90-day reinstatement window). Customers should update account vending pipelines and governance integrations to reference State before the Status deprecation date.