All news in category "Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch"

Check Point Validates CloudGuard with Nutanix AOS 7.3

🔒 Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is now Nutanix Ready validated with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure 7.3, delivering integrated network security for Nutanix environments. The update leverages Nutanix Flow Network Security features—entity groups, vNIC-specific policies, and global policy scopes—to extend microsegmentation and policy consistency. Customers can deploy CloudGuard via native Service Insertion and firewall chaining, enabling protection with minimal operational overhead.

Google Announces AP2: Protocol for Agent-Led Payments

🤖 Google introduced the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), an open standard developed with more than 60 payments and technology firms to enable secure, agent-initiated transactions across platforms. AP2 extends A2A and MCP, using cryptographically-signed Mandates and verifiable credentials to prove authorization, ensure authenticity, and provide a non-repudiable audit trail. The protocol supports cards, real-time bank transfers, and crypto.

FabCon Vienna: Enterprise-ready Microsoft Fabric updates

📢 At FabCon Vienna, Microsoft unveiled a broad set of Microsoft Fabric enhancements to accelerate data-rich agents and enterprise adoption. Key updates include expanded OneLake shortcuts and mirroring (preview for Oracle and BigQuery), a preview Graph database and Maps for geospatial context, developer tooling (MCP, Extensibility Toolkit, CI/CD) and strengthened security controls like Azure Private Link and customer-managed keys. These features focus on zero-copy data access, governance, and operational scalability for mission-critical workloads.

Senator Probes Microsoft over Continued RC4 Use in Kerberos

🔒 Senator Ron Wyden has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Microsoft for its continued use of the RC4 encryption algorithm. The letter highlights a technique called Kerberoasting, which exploits Kerberos ticket encryption to extract service account credentials. The complaint raises concerns about lingering support for weak ciphers in enterprise authentication.

Google Cloud and SAP: Unified Data, AI Agents, and HANA

🚀 Google Cloud and SAP announced tighter integration to unify enterprise data and accelerate intelligent automation. SAP Business Data Cloud now connects to BigQuery via Datasphere, enabling bidirectional replication and AI-ready analytics. Procurement is simplified on the Google Cloud Marketplace with SAP BTP. New agent tooling—Agentspace, the Agent Development Kit, A2A and MCP standards—and expanded M4 memory-optimized VMs certified for SAP HANA aim to speed deployments, improve data consistency, and enable autonomous process automation.

New Practical Guide to Data Science with Google Cloud

📘 Google Cloud has published a new ebook, A Practical Guide to Data Science with Google Cloud, aimed at practitioners adopting an AI-first approach across BigQuery, Vertex AI, and Serverless for Apache Spark. The guide emphasizes unified, streamlined workflows enabled by a central notebook experience that blends SQL, Python, and Spark and includes assistive features in Colab Enterprise to generate multi-step plans and code. It explains how a unified data foundation lets teams manage structured and unstructured data together and use familiar SQL to process documents and images. The ebook also offers real-world use cases with linked notebooks so practitioners can run the examples and accelerate delivery.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.