All news with #cloud security tag

🚀Today AWS announced that Amazon Elastic VMware Service (Amazon EVS) is available in all availability zones in the Asia Pacific (Singapore) and Europe (London) Regions. Amazon EVS runs VMware Cloud Foundation directly within your Amazon VPC on EC2 bare-metal instances powered by AWS Nitro. You can deploy a complete VCF environment in hours using the guided configuration workflow or the AWS CLI with automated deployment, enabling faster migrations, lower latency for end users, and improved compliance and resiliency.

🔒 AWS now supports attaching VPC endpoint policies to Transfer Family interface VPC endpoints, enabling administrators to apply granular access controls to Transfer Family APIs. Administrators can restrict specific API actions, designate which principals may call them, and limit target resources. The capability integrates with existing IAM policies and organizational service control policies, and Transfer Family also supports FIPS 140-3 enabled VPC endpoints across all AWS Regions.

🔐 This post explains how to design defense-in-depth network architectures for generative AI workloads using AWS services. It outlines common external threats — including layer 4 and layer 7 DDoS, web request floods, application-specific exploits, and malicious bots — and maps mitigations to AWS capabilities. The guidance recommends private connectivity via Amazon Bedrock and AWS PrivateLink, edge protections with AWS WAF and AWS Shield, subnet-level controls using AWS Network Firewall, and continuous detection and response with GuardDuty, Inspector, and CloudWatch.

💰 Amazon RDS for Db2 now offers Reserved Instances with up to 47% cost savings versus On-Demand pricing. The offering is available for all supported instance types and supports both Bring Your Own License (BYOL) and Db2 licenses purchased through the AWS Marketplace. Reserved Instances include size flexibility so the discounted rate can automatically apply across sizes within the same instance family (for example, a db.r7i.2xlarge RI applying to two db.r7i.xlarge instances). Reserved Instances can be purchased via the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or AWS SDK; consult Amazon RDS for Db2 Pricing for details.

🔧 Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) gp3 volumes now support up to 64 TiB, 80,000 IOPS, and 2,000 MiB/s throughput — raising previous limits of 16 TiB, 16,000 IOPS, and 1,000 MiB/s. This change simplifies storage architectures by allowing consolidation of striped volumes into a single gp3 volume, reducing operational complexity for storage-intensive and containerized workloads that struggle with multi-volume striping. Pricing remains based on storage plus any additional provisioned IOPS and throughput; the new limits are available in all AWS Commercial and GovCloud (US) regions.

🔍Compute Optimizer now supports 99 additional Amazon EC2 instance types, including the latest Compute Optimized (C8gn, C8gd), General Purpose (M8i, M8i-flex, M8gd), Memory Optimized (R8i, R8i-flex, R8gd), and Storage Optimized (I8ge) families. This expansion helps customers identify additional savings and capture improved price-to-performance from newer instances without manual analysis. The update is available in all regions where Compute Optimizer operates except AWS GovCloud (US) and China, and can be accessed via Console, AWS CLI, or AWS SDK.

🔓 UpGuard discovered a publicly accessible Amazon S3 bucket containing roughly 273,160 PDF documents formatted as NACH MANDATE records that documented bank transfers in India. The files exposed unredacted bank account numbers, transaction amounts and, in many cases, individuals’ names, phone numbers and email addresses. A 55K-file sample (~42 GB) showed 38 financial institutions represented, with AyeFin appearing in nearly 60% of sampled records. UpGuard notified AyeFin and NPCI, escalated to CERT‑IN when the bucket continued to grow, and verified the repository was secured on September 4.

🔔 AWS has announced general availability of new AWS Billing and Cost Management features that let customers create and share custom billing views across multiple AWS Organizations from a single account. Users can share views with accounts outside their organization and combine multiple custom views into consolidated perspectives. These consolidated views are accessible via AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Budgets, enabling cross-organization cost analysis and budgeting.

🔍 Amazon CloudWatch introduces tag-based telemetry so teams can monitor metrics and configure alarms using existing AWS resource tags. This lets DevOps and cloud administrators build dynamic monitoring views that follow organizational tagging, automatically adapting as resources change. Tag-based query filtering cuts manual dashboard and alarm updates, and can be enabled with one click or via the AWS CLI and SDKs.

🚀 Google Cloud has launched Flex-start VMs, a Compute Engine consumption option powered by Dynamic Workload Scheduler that lets single VM instances wait in a managed queue for scarce GPUs. By setting request-valid-for-duration (90 seconds–2 hours) users keep capacity requests in PENDING and avoid custom retry logic. Flex-start VMs offer significant discounts versus on‑demand SKUs, consume preemptible quota, run uninterrupted for up to seven days, and integrate directly via the instances.insert API, gcloud CLI, or the Cloud Console. Instances support stop/start to pause billing and an instanceTerminationAction = STOP to preserve configuration when the seven‑day runtime expires.

🔍 You can now preview Amazon S3 Tables directly in the S3 console without writing SQL. The console preview displays table schema, column types, and sample rows so you can quickly inspect structure and key data points without additional setup. Previews are available in all AWS Regions where S3 Tables are offered. You are charged only for the S3 requests used to read the sampled rows; consult S3 pricing and the S3 User Guide for details.

🔒 Amazon EC2’s account-wide Allowed AMIs setting now supports four new parameters — marketplace codes, deprecation time, creation date, and AMI names — to tighten AMI discovery and usage controls. Previously limited to account IDs and owner aliases, administrators can now define additional criteria to block Marketplace images, filter out outdated AMIs, and enforce naming patterns. These parameters integrate with Declarative Policies and are available in all regions, including AWS China and AWS GovCloud (US), enabling centralized AMI governance across your organization.

⚖️ A year after Google Cloud filed a formal complaint with the European Commission, restrictive cloud licensing by Microsoft remains entrenched and, according to recent disclosures, appears to be intensifying. Microsoft has described efforts to drive customers to Azure as a core growth pillar, while new licensing changes due at the end of September further restrict managed service providers from hosting workloads on competing clouds. Regulators such as the U.K.'s CMA have found these policies harm customers, competition, innovation, and cybersecurity, and multiple global authorities are now scrutinizing the practices.

🔒 CrowdStrike has been named an innovation and growth leader in the 2025 Frost Radar: Cloud Workload Protection Platforms, ranking highest on the Innovation Index. Falcon Cloud Security provides unified, AI-native protection across pre-runtime and runtime, combining agent-based and agentless coverage, shift-left CI/CD policy enforcement, continuous posture management, and runtime defenses. Integration with the Falcon platform’s XDR and MDR and a single sensor for hybrid environments enables faster cross-domain detection and response.

🚀 Google Cloud has extended core Autopilot capabilities to qualified Standard GKE clusters, enabling access to the new container-optimized compute platform via built-in compute classes. Available initially to clusters in the Rapid release channel running 1.33.1-gke.1107000 or later, these features include the autopilot and autopilot-spot compute classes and a provisioning mode that supports gradual adoption. Benefits include rapid horizontal and vertical scaling, pay-for-request billing, efficient bin-packing, and support for GPUs and TPUs for AI workloads.

🔁 Amazon Web Services has made the Application Recovery Controller Region switch feature available in the Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region. Region switch lets teams orchestrate and execute cross-account and cross-Region recovery steps while providing real-time dashboards and consolidated data collection to support regulator and compliance reporting. The feature supports failover/failback for active/passive designs and shift-away/return for active/active architectures, and automatically replicates plans to all Regions where the application runs.

🔧This wrap-up of the Agent Factory series lays out a repeatable blueprint for designing and deploying enterprise-grade AI agents and introduces the agentic web stack. It catalogs eight essential components—communication protocols, discovery, identity and trust, tool invocation, orchestration, telemetry, memory, and governance—and positions Azure AI Foundry as an implementation. The post stresses open standards such as MCP and A2A, emphasizes interoperability across organizations, and highlights observability and governance as core operational requirements.

🔒 This post outlines a practical, layered approach to reduce risk in AWS by moving beyond detective-only controls to a comprehensive defense‑in‑depth control framework. It recommends combining preventative, proactive, detective, and responsive controls across the resource lifecycle and illustrates how AWS services such as AWS Control Tower, AWS Organizations, Security Hub, and AWS Config enable that strategy. The guidance covers concrete patterns—from SCPs, RCPs and policy‑as‑code in CI/CD to automated remediation via Lambda and Systems Manager—to scale governance, reduce findings, and shorten remediation time.

🚀 Amazon Redshift Serverless is now generally available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) region, enabling analysts, developers, and data scientists to run and scale analytics without provisioning or managing clusters. The service automatically provisions and intelligently scales compute, with per-second billing for workload duration. Users can query data via Query Editor V2 or existing BI tools, load data from Amazon S3, restore snapshots, and directly query open formats like Apache Parquet, while benefiting from unified billing across data sources.

🔒 This post describes an automated approach to validate and document exceptions to AWS Security Hub findings, enabling security teams to enforce governance while developers request and implement compensating controls. The solution leverages EventBridge, SQS, Lambda, and DynamoDB to validate controls, collect evidence, and maintain an immutable audit trail. It preserves segregation of duties, supports multiple validation types, and includes deployment scripts and CloudFormation templates. The authors emphasize the reference architecture is a starting point and must be reviewed and adapted before production use.