All news with #cloud security tag

🔒 Google is offering public sector teams a no-cost 30-day test drive of Google Workspace, providing full access to its cloud-native productivity suite with embedded Gemini AI. The pilot includes guided setup, user onboarding, workflow testing, and an impact assessment report to quantify productivity and security benefits. Workspace with Gemini has FedRAMP High authorization and Google Public Sector cites CMMC Level 2 validation for internal systems handling CUI. Agencies can evaluate real workflows commitment-free and gather data to inform adoption decisions.

🚀 Amazon announces that EMR Managed Scaling is now available to EMR on EC2 customers in Asia Pacific (Malaysia, New Zealand, Taipei, Thailand), Canada West (Calgary), Mexico (Central), and US Gameday Northeast (Illinois). The feature automatically resizes EC2 instances to optimize performance and cost; you set minimum and maximum compute limits and EMR adjusts capacity using workload-driven algorithms. It supports Apache Spark, Apache Hive and YARN-based workloads on EMR on EC2 versions 6.14 and above and can use EC2 Spot Instances for additional savings.

🔐 Check Point has extended CloudGuard Network Security to provide full auto-scaling support for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, enabling firewalls to grow and shrink automatically with workload demand. The integration leverages OCI Instance Pools to automate deployment and scaling of security gateways, while preserving centralized policy control. This update broadens CloudGuard’s native support across 20 public and private cloud vendors, delivering consistent security and operational agility as customers move workloads to OCI.

🔒 The AWS European Sovereign Cloud introduces the Sovereign Reference Framework (ESC-SRF), an independently validated set of governance, technical, and operational controls to address strict European sovereignty requirements. The ESC-SRF aligns criteria such as governance independence, data residency, and technical isolation to concrete controls and will be available through AWS Artifact. Customers and partners can use the framework as an assurance model or adapt it to design their own sovereignty controls.

🤖 Microsoft announced a significant set of Azure Storage updates at Ignite 2025 and KubeCon to accelerate AI workloads, cloud-native applications, and migrations. Azure Blob Storage now targets exabyte-scale capacity and multi-tens of Tbps throughput, while Azure Managed Lustre (AMLFS 20 preview) offers 25 PiB namespaces, 512 GBps and HSM with auto-import/export. Additional enhancements — Premium Blob, Smart Tier, Azure Elastic SAN auto-scaling, Ultra Disk latency and cost improvements, Storage Discovery and Copilot, and expanded migration tooling — focus on low-latency inferencing, continuous GPU feeding for training, operational elasticity, and simplified data migrations.

🔒 AWS reiterates its commitment to raising cybersecurity standards across the European Union, positioning security as a core responsibility across its global operations. The post explains how AWS supports customers in meeting the NIS 2 Directive (EU 2022/2555) and related Implementing Regulation (EU 2024/2690) through services, audited controls, and guidance. It highlights certifications, regional accreditations, and tools—such as AWS Security Hub, AWS Config, and AWS CloudTrail—that help entities meet governance, incident reporting, and resilience obligations. The blog also describes AWS collaboration with national authorities and programs that provide templates, training, and operational engagement to improve readiness and compliance.

🔒 The Cortex Cloud team at Palo Alto Networks is hosting a technical webinar that dissects three recent cloud investigations and demonstrates practical defenses. Speakers will reveal the mechanics of AWS identity misconfigurations, techniques attackers use to hide malicious artifacts by mimicking AI model naming, and how overprivileged Kubernetes entities are abused. The session emphasizes Code-to-Cloud detection, runtime intelligence, and audit-log analysis to close visibility gaps; register to attend the live deep dive.

⚠️ UpGuard's analysis of Streamlit-hosted applications uncovered thousands of publicly accessible data apps that expose sensitive business and personal information. In October 2025 scans identified 14,995 unique IPs running Streamlit; after accounting for instances with authentication or errors, over ten thousand apps remained accessible without login. The report documents exposed PII and business intelligence dashboards and recommends practical controls: maintain an inventory of user apps, move sensitive workloads off the Community Cloud, and enable authentication by default.

🚀 Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) is now generally available on Google Cloud, enabling organizations to run their Nutanix hybrid cloud directly on Google Compute Engine bare metal without refactoring workloads. NC2 supports the Z3 and C4 machine families with high-density NVMe local SSDs, integrates Nutanix Flow virtual networking, and maintains unified management via Prism Central. The solution connects to Google data and AI services like BigQuery and Vertex AI, supports license portability, and will be purchasable through Google Cloud Marketplace.

🔒 AWS announced a suite of AI- and automation-driven security features at re:Invent 2025 designed to shift cloud protection from reactive response to proactive prevention. AWS Security Agent and agentic incident response add continuous code review and automated investigations, while ML enhancements in GuardDuty and near real-time analytics in Security Hub improve multi-stage threat detection. Agent-centric IAM tools, including policy autopilot and private sign-in routes, streamline permissions and enforce granular, zero-trust access for agents and workloads.

🔒 In a December 8, 2025 Fortinet post, Ali Bidabadi and Carl Windsor dispel persistent myths about cloud security and emphasize the shared responsibility model. They warn that simple misconfigurations — not sophisticated attacks — often cause large exposures and that cloud-native controls alone leave gaps. The authors recommend adopting CNAPP, third-party NGFW and WAF solutions, and continuous visibility to reduce risk across multi-cloud and hybrid environments.

🗺️ Spatial Data Management on AWS (SDMA) centralizes multimodal spatial assets — 3D, geospatial, behavioral, and temporal data — into a secure, highly available cloud repository. It automates metadata extraction for formats such as .LAZ, .E57, .GLB, and .GLTF, provides REST APIs and customizable connectors, and offers web and desktop interfaces with auto-generated previews to accelerate validation without large downloads. SDMA is designed to simplify integrations, governance, and discoverability to speed operational insights across AWS regions.

🔍 Amazon Connect Customer Profiles now offers Beta segmentation powered by Spark SQL, enabling analysts to build sophisticated customer segments from both custom and standard profile objects. You can join objects, apply statistical functions such as percentiles, and standardize date fields for complex temporal analysis, or use the Segment AI assistant to translate natural language into Spark SQL. AI-generated queries include plain-language explanations and automatic membership estimates so you can review and validate results before deployment. These capabilities work alongside existing segmentation features and integrate with segment membership calls, Flow blocks, and Outbound Campaigns, and are available in all AWS regions where Customer Profiles is offered.

🔍 Modern security teams can no longer rely solely on static, passive internet-scan datasets to understand their external attack surface. Continuous, automated, active reconnaissance verifies what is actually exposed daily, catching ephemeral assets, misconfigurations, and shadow IT that periodic scans miss. Sprocket Security presents an ASM-driven approach that emphasizes validation, ownership attribution, and prioritized, actionable findings to reduce noise and speed remediation. This defensive, non-intrusive enumeration is environment-aware and designed to map changing cloud footprints in near real time.

🔒 The U.S. Department of Transportation has moved its workforce to Google Workspace with Gemini, becoming the first cabinet-level agency to transition away from legacy providers under the GSA OneGov Strategy. More than 12,000 users are already on Workspace, with roughly 40,000 additional employees slated to migrate in 2026. The deployment integrated NotebookLM, Chrome Enterprise Premium, and Workspace Enterprise Plus with Assured Controls Plus, and the foundational system was delivered in just 22 days. DOT emphasizes FedRAMP High authorization, 100% U.S.-based support, and AI-enabled workflows to strengthen security, collaboration, and operational efficiency.

🔍 ISC2’s 2025 Cybersecurity Workforce Study, based on responses from more than 16,000 professionals, reports that 59% of organizations now face critical or significant cyber-skills shortages, up from 44% last year. Technical gaps are most acute in AI (41%), cloud security (36%), risk assessment (29%) and application security (28%), with governance, risk and compliance and security engineering each at 27%. The survey cites a dearth of talent (30%) and budget shortfalls (29%) as leading causes and links shortages to concrete impacts—88% reported at least one significant security incident. Despite concerns, headcount appears to be stabilizing and many professionals view AI as an opportunity for specialization and career growth.

🔍 CrowdStrike identified a China-nexus adversary, WARP PANDA, conducting covert intrusions against VMware vCenter and cloud infrastructure throughout 2025, deploying novel Golang implants and the backdoor BRICKSTORM. Operations emphasized stealth—log clearing, timestomping, unregistered VMs, and tunnelling via vCenter/ESXi/guest VMs—enabling long-term persistence and data staging from live VM snapshots. WARP PANDA also exfiltrated Microsoft 365 and SharePoint content, registered MFA devices, and abused cloud services for C2, prompting recommendations for tighter ESXi/vCenter controls and robust EDR on guests.

🔍 Running into CUDA out-of-memory errors is a common blocker when fine-tuning models; High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) holds model weights, optimizer state, gradients, activations, and framework overhead. The article breaks down those consumers, provides a simple HBM sizing formula, and walks through a 4B-parameter bfloat16 example that illustrates why full fine-tuning can require tens of GBs. It then presents practical mitigations—PEFT with LoRA, quantization and QLoRA, FlashAttention, and multi‑GPU approaches including data/model parallelism and FSDP—plus a sizing guide (16–40+ GB) to help choose the right hardware.

🔍 AWS announced an update to GuardDuty Extended Threat Detection that adds multistage attack detection for Amazon EC2 instances and Amazon ECS clusters running on Fargate or EC2. The release introduces two critical findings — AttackSequence:EC2/CompromisedInstanceGroup and AttackSequence:ECS/CompromisedCluster — that group related events into a single, high-priority alert. Findings include a summary, event timeline, MITRE ATT&CK mappings, and remediation guidance to speed response. Runtime Monitoring must be enabled for full coverage, and customers can try the feature free for 30 days.

🗃️ Amazon S3 Tables now support the Intelligent-Tiering storage class to automatically optimize table storage costs based on access patterns, without impacting performance or adding operational overhead. Data not accessed for 30 days moves to the Infrequent Access tier (≈40% lower cost), and after 90 days moves to Archive Instant Access (≈68% lower cost), enabling up to 80% storage savings. Automated table maintenance (compaction, snapshot expiration, unreferenced file removal) does not trigger tiering, and you can select Intelligent-Tiering per table or set it as the default for new tables in a table bucket across all regions where S3 Tables are available.