This Week in Cloud — February 26, 2026
Welcome back to The Cloud Cover, your essential guide to navigating the dynamic world of cloud for Solutions Architects, engineers, and IT leaders. This week, the AI arms race moved from theory to reality, sovereign clouds went fully disconnected, and hyperscalers doubled down on security at machine speed. Let’s go.
⚡ The AI Arms Race Heats Up
This week, the "arms race" between attackers and defenders in the cloud was more than a metaphor. We saw a stark demonstration of how commercial AI is lowering the bar for attackers while simultaneously giving defenders new tools to strike back.
AWS Threat Intelligence reported a massive campaign where a financially motivated actor used commercial LLMs to automate the compromise of over 600 Fortinet FortiGate firewalls globally. Meanwhile, Google Cloud announced the disruption of "GRIDTIDE," a sophisticated cyber-espionage campaign that exploited legitimate Google Sheets APIs for command and control.
The technical barrier to executing global-scale attacks is quickly shrinking. As attackers weaponize the same AI productivity tools we rely on, the traditional "perimeter" has effectively vanished. In this new reality, defense is no longer about building taller walls, but about achieving the kind of cloud-native visibility that can detect and neutralize automated threats at machine speed.
🔍 The Rundown
AWS: Agentic AI for the Public Sector: AWS announced the general availability of its Kiro agentic AI tool within AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. This deployment represents a critical bridge between modern developer velocity and strict federal compliance, enabling regulated teams to utilize autonomous coding workflows without violating isolation protocols.
AWS: Default Database Encryption: Amazon Aurora now applies server-side encryption by default to all newly provisioned database clusters. This fully managed update establishes a baseline security posture that reduces the blast radius of user-generated misconfigurations at no additional cost.
Azure: Next-Gen AI Models: Microsoft rolled out GPT-5.3-Codex and GPT-Audio-1.5 to Azure AI Foundry. These models are specifically optimized for long-running engineering tasks and real-time audio interaction, broadening the scope of agentic capabilities in the Azure ecosystem.
Azure: Serverless Data Automation: The new Azure Storage Actions service is now available in over 40 regions. It allows for condition-based logic for tagging, tiering, and deletion of data at scale, significantly reducing manual storage management toil.
GCP: Gemini 3.1 Pro Launch: Google introduced Gemini 3.1 Pro in preview on Vertex AI and Gemini Enterprise. This release brings the latest reasoning upgrades and frontier model capabilities directly to Google Cloud developers and enterprise users.
GCP: Autonomous BigQuery Embeddings: A new preview feature for autonomous embedding generation in BigQuery simplifies RAG and semantic search pipelines. By eliminating manual embedding steps, Google is tightening the loop between data warehouses and AI agent runtimes.
OCI: Moroccan Region Expansion: Oracle launched its new Morocco West region in Casablanca. This expansion marks Oracle's continued push into new geographic markets, providing localized infrastructure for northern Africa.
OCI: Networking Flexibility Upgrades: Recent updates to VCN PrivateIP management now support up to 16 private IPs per VNIC. This enhancement simplifies the management of complex network architectures and secondary IP assignments within the cloud environment.
🧐 Best Thing I Saw This Week…
Older than a week, but Hashicorp founder Mitchell Hashimoto wrote a great article on his trial and error process for working with AI agents. Worth a read if you are hoping to include them in your own workflows.
📈 Trending Now: The Rise of the Air-Gapped Cloud
For years, the promise of the cloud was "anywhere, anytime." But this week, Microsoft made a loud case for "here and nowhere else." The expansion of Microsoft Sovereign Cloud into "fully disconnected" operations—covering everything from Azure Local to Microsoft 365—marks a major shift in the industry's trajectory.
We are seeing the culmination of years of "sovereignty" posturing. It’s no longer enough for cloud providers to offer local data residency; they now have to offer local existence. For defense, intelligence, and highly regulated sectors, the "public" part of public cloud is increasingly a dealbreaker. By bringing frontier AI models to hardware that can run entirely offline, the hyperscalers are effectively dismantling the core assumptions around cloud connectivity.
📅 Event Radar
27
Learn about Azure's agentic AI services
12
AI sessions coming to a city near you!
19
Hands on and in person.
👋 Until Next Week
It was a week where the cloud felt both more vulnerable and more robust than ever. As we move into March, keep an eye on how these "disconnected" AI plays start to impact enterprise strategy.