All news in category "Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch"

Forrester: Microsoft Defender Delivers 242% ROI Over 3 Years

🔒 Microsoft’s latest Forrester TEI study found a 242% return on investment over three years for organizations using Microsoft Defender. The analysis attributes $17.8 million in total benefits and reports an average payback period of less than six months for a composite organization. Integrated with Microsoft Sentinel, Defender streamlines SecOps by consolidating tooling, lowering false positives, and accelerating response through automation and KQL-enabled detections. Customers cite improved visibility across hybrid and multicloud environments and reduced operational overhead.

Achieve Agentic Productivity with Vertex AI Agent Builder

🛠️ Vertex AI Agent Builder is a unified platform for building, grounding, and deploying production-grade AI agents, designed to move organizations from prototype to scalable, secure services. It centers development on five pillars: Agent frameworks, Model choice, Tools for taking actions, Scalability and performance, and Built-in trust and security, and supports the Agent Development Kit (ADK) and third-party models including Gemini 2.5 Flash Pro. The platform offers managed runtime features such as sandboxed code execution, Agent-to-Agent collaboration, Bidirectional Streaming, and a streamlined one-line path from ADK prototype to Agent Engine deployment, while enterprise controls like VPC-SC and CMEK address compliance and data protection.

AWS Outposts expand to Canada (Central) and N California

📢 Second-generation AWS Outposts racks are now supported in the AWS Canada (Central) and US West (N. California) Regions. Outposts racks extend AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to on-premises data centers or colocation spaces, providing a consistent hybrid experience. Customers can order racks connected to these Regions to optimize for latency and data residency, run low-latency workloads locally, and maintain centralized management in their home Region.

AWS Kinesis Data Streams Adds IPv6 and FIPS in GovCloud

🌐 Amazon Web Services announced that Kinesis Data Streams now supports API requests over IPv6 in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, with optional dual-stack (IPv4/IPv6) public and VPC endpoints. The new endpoints have been validated under FIPS 140-3, enabling FIPS-compliant encryption for customers contracting with the US federal government. IPv6 support reduces address overlap and simplifies connectivity for devices and networks already using IPv6. This capability is available in all Regions where Kinesis Data Streams operates, including GovCloud and China Regions.

Gemini in Chrome: Secure AI for Enterprise Productivity

🤖 Gemini in Chrome brings AI assistance directly into the browser to help employees summarize reports, extract video insights, recall and navigate tabs, and take actions via integrations with Google Calendar, Docs, and Drive. Rolling out in the U.S. on Mac and Windows with Android availability and iOS coming soon, these features are configurable through Chrome Enterprise Core policies so IT retains control. AI Mode in the omnibox and enhanced Safe Browsing add context-aware responses and proactive protection against AI-driven scams.

Amazon VPC Reachability and Network Access Analyzer Expand

🛰️ Amazon has expanded VPC Reachability Analyzer and VPC Network Access Analyzer to seven additional regions — New Zealand, Hyderabad, Melbourne, Taipei, Calgary, Tel Aviv, and Mexico Central. Reachability Analyzer diagnoses network reachability between source and destination resources, while Network Access Analyzer identifies unintended access paths that may bypass security controls. This regional launch improves troubleshooting, compliance checks, and multi-account network visibility; pricing and documentation are available through AWS resources.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.