Professor Keith Jackson is to be chairman of UK technology transfer organisation Digital Catapult, taking over from Juergen Maier CBE from May 2025. “A successful entrepreneur and engineering leader, Jackson …

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Amazon QuickSight launches highlighting, a new interaction capability for analysis and dashboards. Highlighting allows authors and readers to emphasize and track specific data points across visuals, making it easier to compare data elements throughout a sheet and explore insights more effectively.

With highlighting, simply select or hover over a data point in a visual, and related data across other visuals will stand out, while unrelated data is dimmed or greyed out. This seamless interaction helps users understand correlations, spot patterns, trends and outliers, facilitating faster and more informed analysis.

Highlighting is now available in all supported Amazon QuickSight regions – see here for QuickSight regional endpoints.

This can be turned on under Analysis or Sheet Settings. For more details refer to documentation for analysis settings or sheet settings .
 

Today, AWS End User Messaging launched self-service short code, and long code registration for 18 additional countries, helping developers to onboard to dedicated numbers which enables them to correctly configure SMS messaging for their applications. The new countries supported for long codes include Australia, Austria, Chile, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, Hungary, and Portugal. The new countries supported for short codes include Chile, Finland, Germany, India, Netherlands, Spain, United Kingdom, and United States.

Phone numbers and sender IDs act as an extension of a business’s brand, and mobile carriers and governments worldwide have implemented SMS registrations as a form of “know your customer” check to protect end-users from unwanted and spam messages. By registering, application developers ensure a higher level of deliverability and ensure their use-cases comply with local rules and regulations, avoiding message filtering.

Previously, customers needed to open a support case to request these short code and long code forms, but now they can self-service via the AWS Management Console or programmatically via the APIs, saving time-to-onboard. The registration support is available in all commercial regions where AWS End User Messaging is generally available.
 

AWS announces support for Amazon Redshift Serverless in AWS Backup , making it easier for you to centrally manage data protection of your Amazon Redshift Serverless data warehouse. You can now use AWS Backup to automate backup and restore of both Amazon Redshift Serverless and Amazon Redshift provisioned cluster snapshots, along with other AWS services for compute, storage, and database. Using AWS Backup’s integration with AWS Organizations, you can centrally create and manage immutable backups across all your accounts, standardizing data protection across your organization.

To get started with AWS Backup for Amazon Redshift Serverless, you can use the AWS Backup Management console, API, or CLI to create backup policies. You assign Amazon Redshift Serverless resources to the policies, and AWS Backup automates the creation of backups of Amazon Redshift Serverless data warehouses. You can restore Amazon Redshift Serverless namespace or individual Amazon Redshift tables from your backup vault with a few clicks or with a single API call.

AWS Backup support for Amazon Redshift Serverless is available in all the regions where Amazon Redshift Serverless is already available today. To learn more about AWS Backup support for Amazon Redshift Serverless, visit the AWS Backup product page and documentation .

Amazon QuickSight launches dashboard versioning and the ability to publish any analysis to replace any dashboard to improve author productivity. Dashboard versioning enables authors to view and easily re-publish previously published versions of their dashboards as well as the notes on what updates were made by whom. Publishing any analysis to any dashboard means that authors don’t have to replace a dashboard with the analysis that it started from, but can use any other analysis in the account.

With the launch of these two features, authors can build new analyses with updates and then publish them to the existing dashboard that readers already have bookmarked. Authors don’t have to send out new links and depreciate old versions. In addition, if any issue arises from a new dashboard version, authors have the ability to revert to previous versions of the dashboard so that they can keep the dashboard in a working state while they work on the necessary changes.

Publish any analysis to any dashboard and dashboard versioning are now available in all supported Amazon QuickSight regions – go to this link for QuickSight regional endpoints.

For more details refer to documentation for publish any analysis to any dashboard or dashboard versioning .
 

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the general availability of the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) L2 construct for Amazon Cognito Identity Pools. This library enables developers to programmatically define and deploy Identity Pool resources using familiar programming languages, making it easier to grant users secure access to AWS services in their applications.

With this construct library, you can define Identity Pools as infrastructure as code, configure authentication providers like Amazon Cognito User Pools, social identity providers (Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon), and SAML 2.0 providers. The library helps you implement security best practices by default and reduces the complexity of managing authentication and authorization for your web and mobile applications.

The AWS CDK construct library for Amazon Cognito Identity Pools is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Cognito is available.

To get started, visit the following resources:

• Amazon Cognito Identity Pools documentation
• AWS CDK API Reference

Amazon Connect now allows supervisors to take additional actions on in-progress chats directly from the Amazon Connect UI, accelerating issue resolution and improving customer satisfaction. For example, supervisors can now end chats with inactive customers or reassign chats to specific agents or queues.

To learn more, please refer to the help documentation or visit the Amazon Connect website. This feature is available in all commercial AWS regions where Amazon Connect is available.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) Proxy now supports version 1.3 of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol for Proxy connections to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL and RDS for PostgreSQL database instances. TLS 1.3 provides improved security through stronger cryptographic algorithms and simplified handshake process as compared to older TLS versions.

With this release, RDS Proxy can use TLS 1.3 for connections to Aurora PostgreSQL and RDS for PostgreSQL databases. During connection establishment, Proxy will automatically negotiate the most secure supported TLS version supported with the database. Customers can also configure their PostgreSQL database to require TLS 1.3, by setting the ssl_min_protocol_version parameter in their parameter group. TLS 1.3 is already supported for connections to RDS Proxy, as well as for RDS Proxy connections to MySQL engines.

RDS Proxy is a fully managed and a highly available database proxy for RDS and Amazon Aurora databases. RDS Proxy helps improve application scalability, resiliency, and security. For information about TLS version support and related configuration on Aurora, please review Aurora documentation. For information on supported database engine versions and regional availability of RDS Proxy, refer to our RDS and Aurora documentations.
 

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the general availability of the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) L2 construct library for Amazon EventBridge Scheduler. This construct library allows developers to programmatically create, configure, and manage scheduled tasks using infrastructure as code with their preferred programming language, simplifying the process of building event-driven applications.

The EventBridge Scheduler construct library enables you to define schedules using cron or rate expressions, configure target destinations including AWS Lambda functions, Amazon SQS queues, and other AWS services, and manage execution windows and retry policies. Developers can now leverage type-safe programming languages to define their scheduling infrastructure, improving code maintainability and reducing configuration errors.

The AWS CDK construct library for Amazon EventBridge Scheduler is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon EventBridge Scheduler is available.

To get started, visit the following resources:

• Amazon EventBridge Scheduler documentation
• AWS CDK API Reference for EventBridge Scheduler
• AWS CDK Developer Guide

AWS IAM Identity Center enhanced its session management and trusted identity propagation (TIP) capabilities for customers that connect Microsoft Active Directory (AD) as their identity source. The enhanced capabilities help customers manage user sessions, scale their use of AWS applications, such as Amazon Q Developer Pro, and implement use cases, such as for analytics, with trusted identity propagation.

With this release, customers who connect Microsoft AD to IAM Identity Center will be able to: (a) configure the session duration for AWS applications and the AWS access portal from a minimum of 15 minutes to a maximum of 90 days; (b) list and delete active user sessions; (c) configure an extended 90-day session duration for Amazon Q Developer Pro, while maintaining shorter session duration for other AWS applications; and (d) enable TIP from business intelligence applications that authenticate users via a third party identity provider to AWS services, such as Amazon Redshift and Amazon Q Business.

IAM Identity Center is the recommended service for managing workforce access to AWS applications and multiple AWS accounts. It enables you to connect your existing source of workforce identities to AWS once and offer your users single sign on experience across AWS. It powers the personalized experiences offered by AWS applications, such as Amazon Q; and the ability to define and audit user-aware access to data in AWS services, such as Amazon Redshift. It helps you manage access to multiple AWS accounts from a central place. IAM Identity Center is available at no additional cost in these AWS Regions . Learn more here .