All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔍 At Google Cloud, collaboration with customers guided a technical sprint in January 2026 with a major telecommunications partner to refine Model Armor, the runtime security service for generative AI. By embedding with the customer's developers and security teams, the Google Cloud Developer Advocacy group observed real-world workflows and identified friction points such as search-first documentation needs, tuning confidence levels to avoid false positives, clearer enforcement guidance, and IAM-related 403 errors during integrations. The team translated these findings into tested code samples, a confidence level matrix, explicit integration guides for Apigee, Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, and GKE, and deeper technical documentation to improve operational utility and reduce deployment friction.

🔔 AWS Marketplace reduced its listing fee for professional services private offers from 2.5% to 0.5%, making it more economical for consulting partners, systems integrators, managed service providers and ISVs to transact services. The change applies automatically to new private offers across all AWS Regions, pricing models, and currencies, while existing offers remain on their original terms. Partners can list through AWS Partner Central and customers can discover services via AI-powered features and multi-product solutions.

🔔 Partners co-selling with AWS can now automate private offer pricing within co-sell workflows. By predefining pricing rules, discount limits, and eligible products, partners enable AWS sellers to convert opportunities to private offers quickly, shortening what used to be weeks of negotiation into minutes. Customers receive tailored offers based on their specifications, and partners gain visibility and direct follow-up access to assist with acceptance and context.

🟢 AWS introduces the Amazon Connect Customer Competency, a new specialization that validates Services Partners with expertise in transforming contact centers and embedding AI across customer interactions. The competency covers two categories: Contact Center Transformation and AI-Powered Customer Experience, recognizing partners who migrate legacy contact centers and operationalize AI at scale on Amazon Connect. This competency replaces the Amazon Connect Service Delivery Program, which will be deprecated on June 1, 2027.

🆕 Amazon S3 now supports annotations, enabling attachment of custom JSON, XML, or YAML metadata to objects at up to 1GB per object to provide business context for AI agents and analytics tools. Annotations persist with objects through replication and copy operations, can be modified or deleted at any time, and share the same durability and consistency as the object. You can surface annotations in S3 Metadata for query via Apache Iceberg tables, or search them with natural language using Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio and supporting tools.

🛒 AWS Marketplace Storefront is now generally available, enabling AWS Partners to create and deploy branded catalogs of solutions and services on their own websites or applications in hours. Channel Partners and ISVs can import listings with no code, use AWS Marketplace billing for transactions, and automate deal workflows with private offer templates and CRM integrations like Salesforce and HubSpot. The storefront supports curated catalogs on partners' domains and is available in all AWS Marketplace regions.

🚀 AWS announced a public preview that extends AWS Transform for migrations to replicate block storage workloads directly to Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. The capability lets application owners and cloud migration teams move block and NFS datastores from on‑premises or other clouds into FSx for ONTAP alongside compute and network migrations. This removes intermediate storage platforms and separate migration tools, simplifying workflows and reducing cost and risk. FSx for ONTAP provides a fully managed ONTAP-based destination to preserve enterprise storage features while leveraging AWS scale and resiliency.

🤝 Today AWS announced general availability of onboarding agents for AWS Partner Central. The agent serves as an always-available advisor that guides new partners through profile setup, verifications, tax and payment setup, compliance, and preparing listings on Marketplace. Partners can interact with the agent in the AWS Partner Central console or programmatically via Model Context Protocol (MCP). The agent auto-populates partner profiles using company website data and provides a personalized roadmap to accelerate readiness to sell with AWS.

🚀Starting today, Amazon EC2 P6-B200 instances accelerated by NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs are available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region. These instances deliver up to 2x performance versus P5en for AI training and inference and include 8 Blackwell GPUs with 1440 GB of high-bandwidth GPU memory. They offer a 60% increase in GPU memory bandwidth, 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors, and up to 3.2 Tbps of EFAv4 networking, powered by the AWS Nitro System.

⚠️ This article launches Unit 42's series Inside the Modern SOC, drawing on customer environments, SOC assessments and investigations to highlight a defining challenge: the speed gap. Attack timelines have compressed dramatically — in some cases from initial access to data exfiltration in about 72 minutes — driven by identity-driven tactics and AI-accelerated adversaries. The piece emphasizes that manual, sequential workflows and fragmented tooling leave defenders behind and argues for automated correlation, predefined response actions and behavior-focused detection to close the gap.

🔒 AWS Management Console Private Access now lets customers reach the AWS Console from VPCs without any internet connectivity, enabling management of AWS infrastructure in air-gapped and strictly controlled networks. The feature routes console traffic through VPC endpoints using AWS PrivateLink, letting customers enforce VPC endpoint policies and existing IAM, Service Control, and Resource Control policies. Available in all AWS commercial regions, customers pay only for the underlying VPC endpoint usage and data processing.

🔍 AWS Transform today launched a Preview of continuous modernization that autonomously detects, prioritizes, and remediates technical debt across enterprise software portfolios. The capability brings visibility across thousands of repositories, supports assessments like agentic and modernization readiness, and integrates with AWS Security Agent to find and fix source code vulnerabilities. Customers can connect repositories from GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and run analyses via the web console, CLI, Transform Kiro, or coding agents, with job state synchronized across surfaces. The service is available in US East (N. Virginia) and Europe (Frankfurt) regions.

📌 Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Memory now allows applications to attach metadata values directly to short-term memory events so those values are preserved exactly when converted into long-term memory records. Previously, metadata had to be inferred by the LLM during extraction. Setting a metadata key to STRICTLY_CONSISTENT ensures the provided value is unchanged, prevents merging across different values, and lets you group events for department scoping, compliance boundaries, and multi-tenant isolation. The feature supports up to three strictly consistent STRING keys per strategy and is available in all AWS Regions where AgentCore Memory is supported.

🔁 Amazon FSx for OpenZFS now supports on-demand replication to and from AWS opt-in Regions, enabling incremental point-in-time snapshot transfers beyond default-enabled Regions. This feature simplifies disaster recovery, cross-account replication, and lower-latency global access while leveraging FSx for OpenZFS’s snapshots, cloning, and high throughput. Available wherever FSx for OpenZFS is offered, replication carries no extra FSx charge; standard inter-Region data transfer fees apply.

✅ AWS Partner Central now accepts SOC 2 Type II audit reports or AWS Well-Architected Framework Reviews (WAFR) to complete the Foundational Technical Review (FTR) in minutes. The process uses AI-powered validation to provide immediate approval or actionable feedback, accelerating access to the qualified software badge, APN program eligibility, co-selling, and funding benefits. Partners with SOC 2 can submit third-party reports; those without can submit WAFR reports from the AWS Well-Architected Tool. The service provides specific AI-generated remediation steps when issues are found, and FTR is available to all partners for solutions deployed on AWS and with AWS Partner Revenue Measurement enabled.

🛠️ Amazon CloudWatch introduces Log Analytics, a unified console that combines CloudWatch Logs Insights, Live Tail, and Contributor Insights for integrated log querying, real-time streaming, and contributor identification. Users can run multiple queries in tabs, leverage patterns, saved queries with parameters, facets, natural language query generation, and visualizations. Live Tail and Contributor Insights are accessible within Log Analytics, which is the default experience, while opt-out users retain separate access to each feature. The capability is available in all commercial AWS Regions and uses existing pricing for Logs Insights queries, Live Tail, and Contributor Insights.

🛡️ Amazon Web Services announces a preview integration of Palo Alto Networks Advanced DNS Security with Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall. Security teams can now subscribe to PANW protections directly from the DNS Firewall console and apply categories like Command and Control, Malware, and Phishing without deploying separate firewalls. The integration supports hybrid traffic, AWS multi-account management, centralized visibility via AWS Security Hub, and preview availability across multiple regions.

🚀 Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) Express Mode is now available in AWS GovCloud (US-East) and AWS GovCloud (US-West). ECS Express Mode lets developers rapidly launch containerized applications with AWS-managed domains, public or private HTTPS, and automatic scaling. It consolidates up to 25 services behind a single Application Load Balancer with rule-based routing while keeping all resources fully accessible in your account. Deployments can be performed via Console, SDK, CLI, CloudFormation, CDK, and Terraform; you pay only for the AWS resources provisioned.

🤖 Google announces expanded Agentic Data Cloud capabilities, introducing new data agents and tools to enable conversational analytics and agent-driven workflows across BigQuery, Lakehouse, AlloyDB, Spanner, and Cloud SQL. The update includes Data Engineering, Data Science, Database Observability, Looker Dashboard, Data Insights, and Deep Research agents, plus developer toolkits like the Data Agent Kit and Managed MCP servers. These features aim to ground agents in real-time enterprise data with unified governance and near-100% accuracy for tasks such as NL-to-SQL conversions and automated pipeline maintenance.

🔔 The NCSC warns organisations to brace for a large-scale “patch wave” as AI accelerates exploitation of technical debt. Check Point outlines how Exposure Management helps public sector and CNI teams identify internet-facing assets, prioritise exploitable vulnerabilities, and remediate safely. The guidance emphasises discovery, exploitability-based prioritisation, and compensating controls to reduce MTTR.