All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

⚡ Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio introduces data preview v2.0 for Visual ETL, delivering near-instant preview results (about one second) while building and iterating on ETL jobs. The new mode runs an in-browser query engine that fetches and caches source data locally, removing dependence on server-side Spark sessions and avoiding additional compute costs. It supports CSV, Parquet, and JSON from Amazon S3, as well as Amazon Redshift, S3 Tables, AWS Glue Data Catalog, and many third-party sources including Snowflake and common relational databases. A toggle lets users switch back to the original Spark-based preview when needed.

🎧 Microsoft introduces The Shift, an evolution of its earlier podcast to explore agentic AI across engineering, product, and strategy perspectives. Over eight weekly episodes this spring, hosts and guests from teams including Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Fabric, and Microsoft Foundry tackle practical questions about how agents interact with data, databases, and cloud foundations. Episodes emphasize that agents succeed only when data strategy, cloud reliability, and application orchestration work together, highlighting operational concerns like observability, governance, security, and optimization.

🚀 Starting today, Amazon Web Services has made EC2 G7e instances, powered by NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs, available in Asia Pacific (Seoul) and Europe (Spain). These instances deliver up to 2.3x inference performance versus G6e and support up to eight GPUs (96 GB each), 192 vCPUs, and 1,600 Gbps of networking for demanding LLM, multimodal, and spatial computing workloads. G7e also supports NVIDIA GPUDirect P2P and GPUDirect RDMA with EFA for accelerated multi-GPU and multi-node performance and can be purchased as On-Demand, Spot, or via Savings Plans. Provisioning is available through the AWS Management Console, CLI, and SDKs.

🛡️Microsoft will update Teams to clearly label external third-party bots that appear in meeting lobbies, and organizers will be required to explicitly admit them. The change is slated for May 2026 and will reach Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS for worldwide standard multi-tenant and GCC clouds. By distinguishing bots from human attendees, the feature aims to prevent malicious or unwanted automated participants from being inadvertently accepted into meetings and complements recent Teams security enhancements such as call-reporting, fraud-protection warnings, and Defender-based admin controls.

🔒 Google has been named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: U.S. State and Local Government Professional Security Services 2025–2026 assessment. The recognition highlights Mandiant integration with Gemini AI and Google’s secure, AI-optimized infrastructure to accelerate detection rule generation, attacker script analysis, and incident investigations. The report also notes Mandiant’s full incident lifecycle support—including crisis communications, legal coordination, and board-level reporting—delivered across engagements with Fairfax County, the State of Nevada, and the University of Hawaii.

🔐 Password audits commonly validate complexity, length and rotation but frequently miss the accounts attackers prefer. Many organizations overlook reused or breached credentials, orphaned and dormant accounts, and high‑value service accounts with non‑expiring passwords. Point-in-time checks also fail to catch continuous threats like credential stuffing. Modern audits should add breached-password screening, risk-based prioritization, and continuous monitoring using tools such as Specops Password Policy.

🔧Microsoft has confirmed it is still working to fully resolve a bug that causes bright white flashes when opening File Explorer on some Windows 11 systems. The company has rolled fixes to Windows Insiders in the Beta and Dev channels via preview builds Build 26220.7961 (KB5079382) and Build 26300.7965 (KB5079385). Those updates remove white flashes when launching new Explorer windows or tabs and when resizing elements, and also add voice typing and improved file unblocking reliability. Microsoft originally linked the issue to the optional KB5070311 update in December.

🔍 Cloudflare today announced the beta of its Web and API Vulnerability Scanner, initially focused on detecting Broken Object Level Authorization (BOLA) in APIs. The scanner integrates with API Shield, leveraging passive schema learning and API discovery to construct stateful, credentialed tests without extensive setup. It builds automatic scan plans from OpenAPI specs, augments missing or ambiguous schema data using Workers AI, and can create owner and attacker request chains to detect logic flaws. Credential handling uses HashiCorp Vault Transit to encrypt secrets and Temporal for orchestration.

🛡️ Microsoft today unveiled Agent 365 and Microsoft 365 E7: The Frontier Suite, generally available May 1, 2026, to help organizations observe, secure, and govern agentic AI at scale. Agent 365 provides a unified control plane with an agent registry, behavior and performance observability, and integrated risk signals across Microsoft Defender, Entra, and Purview. The offering extends identity and access controls with Agent ID, conditional access, and identity governance, while Purview features such as Inline DLP for Copilot Studio prompts, information protection, and data lifecycle management help prevent sensitive data exposure. Pricing starts at $15 per user per month for Agent 365 and $99 per user per month for Microsoft 365 E7.

🎮 Sony Interactive rebuilt its global Entitlements service on Google Cloud Spanner, migrating from Apache Cassandra and Oracle to a single, strongly consistent distributed SQL datastore. They normalized the schema, co‑located each player's entitlements with their account, eliminated a 500+ TB redundant search index, and reduced per‑player storage from ~3 MB to 0.12 MB. The live migration completed with zero downtime and delivered ~91% storage reduction, ~48% cost savings, and immediate cross‑region visibility via Spanner's TrueTime and geo‑partitioning. Engineers now maintain a simpler stack and can scale regionally to hundreds of nodes without rework.

🔒 This contributed piece from Bitdefender explains how a unified security platform can help mid-market organizations meet enterprise-level expectations without enterprise budgets. The article promotes Bitdefender GravityZone and an upcoming webinar that shows how consolidating tools can simplify operations, reduce costs, and strengthen security posture. It targets IT directors, CISOs, and lean security teams seeking practical steps to demonstrate reduced risk and free up resources.

🔐 Security vendors are reframing post-quantum cryptography (PQC) from a theoretical concern into an operational priority, emphasizing discovery, inventory, and crypto-agility across enterprise environments. Companies such as Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, and Cloudflare are packaging visibility, assessment, and compensating-controls while specialist firms like SandboxAQ deliver continuous monitoring via AQtive Guard. With NIST standards finalized and a 2030 readiness horizon, vendors stress phased migration and prioritization for long-lived sensitive data. The market is competitive as providers position to guide enterprises through complex modernization and legacy constraints.

🔒 Cloudflare argues that SASE and Zero Trust migrations no longer need to be multi-year projects. Partners such as TachTech and Adapture report compressing deployments from 18 months to as little as four to six weeks by using the Cloudflare One platform. Key accelerators include identity-first on-ramps, a consolidated policy engine for SWG and ZTNA, and cloud-native connectors like cloudflared. The platform's extensibility also supports custom environments and provides AI-focused controls for safer LLM adoption.

🔒 Falcon for XIoT now extends asset protection to medical devices and clinical systems, adding native visibility for protocols such as DICOM and HL7. The cloud-native Falcon sensor, available in beta, monitors device behavior and protocol communications to detect anomalies and block malicious actions before they affect patient care. It integrates device telemetry, AI-driven analytics, and CrowdStrike Exposure Management so security teams can discover legacy or unsupported assets, prioritize high-risk devices, and respond within existing SOC workflows. Integration with Falcon Next‑Gen SIEM and Falcon Fusion SOAR streamlines investigation and triage across IT and XIoT assets.

🔒OpenAI on Friday began rolling out Codex Security, an AI-powered security agent that finds, validates, and proposes fixes for vulnerabilities. The feature is available in a research preview to ChatGPT Pro, Enterprise, Business, and Edu customers via the Codex web and will be free for the next month. During its beta, the agent scanned more than 1.2 million commits, identifying 792 critical and 10,561 high-severity findings across multiple open-source projects. OpenAI says the offering combines frontier-model reasoning with automated validation to reduce false positives and deliver actionable fixes.

🔎 The Forrester Total Economic Impact study modeled a composite $10B enterprise using Microsoft Foundry and estimated a 327% ROI over three years, with developer productivity identified as the largest contributor at $15.7M. Foundry reduced undifferentiated engineering work and improved technical team productivity up to 35%, with some teams seeing payback in as few as six months. Its unified platform, reusable knowledge bases, built-in evaluations, and agent controls also enabled organizations to decommission legacy tools and avoid infrastructure costs.

📦 Amazon Redshift now supports reusable templates for the COPY command, allowing teams to store and reuse commonly used COPY parameters across ingestion workflows. Templates standardize formatting and load options, reducing manual configuration and the risk of errors. Changes made to a template apply to future COPY operations, simplifying maintenance and updates. The feature is available in all AWS Regions, including AWS GovCloud (US).

🧩 Amazon Redshift now supports nine new array functions for the SUPER data type — ARRAY_CONTAINS, ARRAY_DISTINCT, ARRAY_EXCEPT, ARRAY_INTERSECTION, ARRAY_POSITION, ARRAY_POSITIONS, ARRAY_SORT, ARRAY_UNION, and ARRAYS_OVERLAP. These functions enable searching, comparing, sorting, and transforming arrays directly in SQL, reducing the need for custom PartiQL logic. They simplify nested-data analytics and are available in all AWS Regions, including GovCloud.

💡 This post shows how to combine GKE Autopilot GPU time-sharing with vCluster to host isolated Ollama instances serving open models on shared GPU nodes. It outlines steps to provision Autopilot, create virtual clusters, deploy Ollama with GPU-sharing labels, and pull models for verification. The approach reduces GPU underutilization and simplifies multi-tenant operations. Teams keep isolated control planes while sharing hardware, lowering costs and operational overhead.

🗂️ Microsoft will add granular file- and folder-level restore to Microsoft 365 Backup, allowing administrators to browse, search and recover individual files from SharePoint and OneDrive restore points rather than restoring entire sites or drives. The capability is limited to tenants with the backup service enabled and requires the SharePoint Backup Administrator role; end users will not see restore operations. Public preview began in early March 2026 and Microsoft expects general availability between late April and early May 2026. Customers are advised to review coverage, train backup administrators, and update recovery runbooks to incorporate file- and folder-level restores.