All news in category "Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch"

OpenSearch Serverless: CloudTrail data-plane audit logging

🔒 Amazon has added detailed audit logging for OpenSearch Serverless data-plane requests through AWS CloudTrail. Customers can now record and retain user actions on collections — including authorization attempts, index changes, and search queries — to support compliance and incident investigations. Logs can be filtered with read-only or write-only options or captured using advanced event selectors for granular control. Data events are delivered to Amazon S3 and can be forwarded to Amazon CloudWatch Events for real-time monitoring and response.

EC2 Auto Scaling adds synchronous LaunchInstances API

🔔 Today, EC2 Auto Scaling launched a synchronous LaunchInstances API that gives customers precise control over where instances are provisioned and provides immediate feedback on capacity availability. The API supports overrides for any Availability Zone and/or subnet in an Auto Scaling group and includes optional asynchronous retries to help reach desired capacity. It is available now in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) at no additional cost beyond standard EC2 and EBS usage. Use the AWS CLI or SDKs to get started.

Microsoft to Natively Integrate Sysmon in Windows 11

🛡️ Microsoft will integrate Sysmon natively into Windows 11 and Windows Server 2025, removing the need to deploy the standalone Sysinternals tool. The built-in functionality will preserve Sysmon’s capabilities, including support for custom configuration files and advanced event filtering, and logs events to the Windows Event Log. Administrators can enable it via Optional Features or run sysmon -i (or sysmon -i <config>) to load a custom configuration, and updates will be delivered through Windows Update to simplify management and improve coverage in large environments.

Automating Session Manager Preferences with CloudFormation

🔐 This post explains how to centrally manage AWS Systems Manager Session Manager preferences across multiple accounts and Regions using CloudFormation StackSets and an AWS Lambda function. The solution automates updates to the SSM-SessionManagerRunShell document, provisions optional logging destinations (Amazon S3 or CloudWatch Logs), and can create KMS keys for session and log encryption. It aims to reduce manual configuration errors and ensure consistent security and compliance at scale.

Microsoft Teams adds false-positive threat report option

🔔 Microsoft is adding a user-driven false-positive reporting capability to Microsoft Teams, allowing users to flag chat or channel messages they believe were incorrectly marked as security threats. The feature began a targeted rollout in September and is scheduled to reach general availability worldwide by the end of November 2025. It will be available to organizations using Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Plan 2 or Microsoft Defender XDR, and accessible on desktop, mobile, and web. Administrators can enable or disable the feature from the Teams admin center or the Microsoft Defender portal.

AWS Releases Responsible AI and Updated ML Lenses at Scale

🔔 AWS has published one new Responsible AI lens and updated Generative AI and Machine Learning lenses to guide safe, secure, and production-ready AI workloads. The guidance addresses fairness, reliability, and operational readiness while helping teams move from experimentation to production. Updates include recommendations for Amazon SageMaker HyperPod, Agentic AI, and integrations with Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio, Amazon Q, and Amazon Bedrock. The lenses are aimed at business leaders, ML engineers, data scientists, and risk and compliance professionals.

Using Private NAT for Overlapping Private IP Spaces

🔒 Google Cloud's Private NAT enables secure private-to-private translation to connect networks with overlapping or non-routable IPv4 ranges without running NAT appliances. As a managed Cloud NAT feature, it delivers high availability, automatic scalability, and centralized control for hybrid and multi‑VPC topologies. The post includes practical gcloud examples and Network Connectivity Center use cases to guide implementation.

TimesFM Integration Brings Forecasting to BigQuery

🕒 Google is integrating the TimesFM time-series foundation model into BigQuery and AlloyDB, enabling zero-shot forecasting on customer data without retraining. AI.FORECAST and AI.EVALUATE are now Generally Available in BigQuery, while AI.DETECT_ANOMALIES is in public preview. TimesFM 2.5 offers improved accuracy and lower latency, supports dynamic context windows up to 15K, and can return historical data with forecasts. AlloyDB preview lets users call TimesFM endpoints hosted on Vertex AI so operational data can be forecasted in-place, preserving data residency and reducing export overhead.

Google Cloud launches 30-day Cloud SQL free trial edition

🚀 Google Cloud today announced a 30-day free trial for Cloud SQL, offering preconfigured MySQL and PostgreSQL instances to evaluate enterprise-grade features without upfront commitment. The trial exposes Performance, High Availability, and Data Cache capabilities and mirrors production-oriented SKUs (Enterprise and Enterprise Plus). Users can one-click upgrade to paid instances at any time; after 30 days instances are suspended and kept stopped for an additional 90 days at no charge. The offer is available in all Google Cloud regions.

Ambient and Autonomous Security for the Agentic Era

🛡️ At Microsoft Ignite 2025, Microsoft set out an ambient, autonomous security approach for the emerging agentic era and announced a suite of tools to observe, secure, and govern AI agents and apps. The centerpiece is Microsoft Agent 365, a control plane providing an Entra-based registry, access controls, visualization, and integrations with Defender, Entra, and Purview to detect prompt-injection, prevent leakage, and enable auditing. Microsoft also expanded platform protections, enhanced Copilot data controls in Purview, and positioned Microsoft Sentinel and Security Copilot as agentic security pillars for detection and response.

Azure Introduces Copilot Agents and AI Infrastructure

🚀 At Microsoft Ignite 2025, Microsoft unveiled a suite of Azure infrastructure and AI operational innovations built for scale, reliability, and security. Azure Copilot introduces an agentic operations model with six specialized agents—migration, deployment, optimization, observability, resiliency, and troubleshooting—designed to automate routine cloud management while enforcing RBAC and policy. The release also highlights new AI datacenter architecture (Fairwater), deployment of NVIDIA GB300 GPUs at scale, and platform improvements like Azure Boost and AKS Automatic to accelerate performance and reduce operational overhead.

Microsoft Foundry: Modular, Interoperable Secure Agent Stack

🔧 Microsoft today expanded Foundry, its platform for building production AI apps and agents, with new models, developer tools, and governance controls. Key updates include broader model access (Anthropic, Cohere, NVIDIA), a generally available model router, and public previews for Foundry IQ, Agent Service features (hosted agents, memory, multi-agent workflows), and the Foundry Control Plane. Foundry Tools and Foundry Local bring real-time connectors and edge inference, while Managed Instance on Azure App Service eases .NET cloud migrations.

Microsoft Databases and Fabric: Unified AI Data Estate

🧠 Microsoft details a broad expansion of its database portfolio and deeper integration with Microsoft Fabric to simplify data architectures and accelerate AI. Key launches include general availability of SQL Server 2025, GA of Azure DocumentDB (MongoDB-compatible), the preview of Azure HorizonDB, and Fabric-hosted SaaS databases for SQL and Cosmos DB. OneLake mirroring, Fabric IQ semantic modeling, expanded agent capabilities, and partner integrations (SAP, Salesforce, Databricks, Snowflake, dbt) are positioned to deliver zero-ETL analytics and operational AI at scale.

Azure Ignite 2025: Azure's Agentic AI and Data Innovations

🚀 At Microsoft Ignite 2025, Azure introduced a coordinated set of agentic and data-first capabilities to accelerate enterprise AI adoption. Announcements include Microsoft Agent Factory (available), previews of Fabric IQ and Foundry IQ, expanded Foundry model choices (Anthropic, Cohere), and new database offerings like Azure HorizonDB and Azure DocumentDB. The updates emphasize unified data, model choice, and integrated security to simplify building, running, and governing AI agents at scale.

Security Copilot Agents Included with Microsoft 365 E5

🛡️ Microsoft is including Security Copilot agents in Microsoft 365 E5, embedding AI-driven assistants across Defender, Entra, Intune, and Purview to accelerate investigations and automate routine tasks. The rollout begins today for existing Security Copilot customers on E5 and will expand to all E5 tenants in the coming months with a 30-day notification. The announcement adds 12 Microsoft-built preview agents, 30+ partner agents, and support for customer-built agents to tailor workflows.

Prisma AIRS Integration with Azure AI Foundry for Security

🔒 Palo Alto Networks announced that Prisma AIRS now integrates natively with Azure AI Foundry, enabling direct prompt and response scanning through the Prisma AIRS AI Runtime Security API. The integration provides real-time, model-agnostic threat detection for prompt injection, sensitive data leakage, malicious code and URLs, and toxic outputs, and supports custom topic filters. By embedding security into AI development workflows, teams gain production-grade protections without slowing innovation; the feature is available now via an early access program.

Meta Expands WhatsApp Security Research Effort

🛡️ Meta has provided selected long‑time bug bounty researchers with a new tool, WhatsApp Research Proxy, to streamline analysis of WhatsApp's network protocol and reduce barriers to in‑depth research. The company is also running a pilot that invites research teams to focus on platform abuse with internal engineering and tooling support. Meta said it has paid more than $25 million to over 1,400 researchers in 15 years and recently added anti‑scraping protections after a study showed an account‑enumeration technique able to map billions of users.

Anthropic Claude Models Available in Microsoft Foundry

🚀 Microsoft announced integration of Anthropic's Claude models into Microsoft Foundry, making Azure the only cloud to provide both Claude and GPT frontier models on a single platform. The release brings Claude Haiku 4.5, Sonnet 4.5, and Opus 4.1 to Foundry with enterprise governance, observability, and deployment controls. Foundry Agent Service, the Model Context Protocol, skills-based modularity, and a model router are highlighted as tools to operationalize agentic workflows for coding, research, cybersecurity, and business automation. Token-based pricing tiers for the Claude models are published for standard deployments.

AWS EC2 I7ie Instances Arrive in Singapore Region Now

🚀 Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched EC2 I7ie instances in the Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region. Designed for large storage I/O–intensive workloads, I7ie pairs 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors with 3rd‑generation AWS Nitro SSDs to deliver up to 40% better compute and up to 65% improved real‑time storage performance versus I3en. Instances support up to 120 TB local NVMe density, up to twice the vCPU and memory of prior generations, nine size options, and up to 100 Gbps networking with 60 Gbps EBS bandwidth.

Amazon Polly adds five voices and three Asia Pacific regions

🎧 Amazon Polly now offers five new Generative TTS voices—Austrian German (Hannah), Irish English (Niamh), Brazilian Portuguese (Camila), Belgian Dutch (Lisa), and Korean (Seoyeon)—bringing the Generative engine to thirty-one voices across twenty locales. The Generative engine is generally available in three new Asia Pacific regions: Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and all Generative voices are now available in US East (N. Virginia), Europe (Frankfurt), and US West (Oregon). These updates expand Amazon Polly's managed text-to-speech capabilities for conversational AI and speech content creation.