Amazon Connect scheduling now allows contact center managers to automatically generate agent schedules with a combination of fixed and flexible working days each week, i.e. agents will have certain mandatory work days while other days are scheduled based on demand. Before this launch, managers had to manually adjust a subset of agent schedules to align with their flexible work contracts and regional labor laws. With this launch, the system automatically proposes flexible schedules allowing managers to create more optimized labor/union compliant agent schedules, freeing up valuable time for more important tasks.

Today, AWS Clean Rooms launches two new capabilities that give customers flexibility to generate richer insights: custom analysis rule and analysis templates. These capabilities enable customers to bring their own custom SQL queries into an AWS Clean Rooms collaboration based on their specific use cases. With the custom analysis rule, customers can create their own queries using advanced SQL constructs, as well as review queries prior to their collaboration partners running them. This workflow gives customers built-in control of how their data is used in collaborations upfront, in addition to reviewing query logs after analyses are complete. Using analysis templates, customers can create queries with parameters that provide reusability and flexibility to those running queries in a collaboration. This helps customers expand and automate types of analyses they run frequently with multiple partners, minimize the need to write new SQL code when analyzing collective data sets. 

Amazon Connect flow designer now includes a toolbar with shortcuts to new editing capabilities such as undo (including a history of previous actions) and redo, along with existing shortcuts such as copy and paste. You can also now add notes to a flow, allowing you to document things like what the flow is doing or a to-do list of what updates you want to make. You can attach notes to a specific flow block and search notes using the toolbar.

Amazon Connect now supports restricting the use and access of attributes to a single flow. Now, you can granularly control when an attribute is associated with a contact (and shows up in the contact record) or if it can only be accessed by a specific flow (used only when that flows is executing a customer experience). For example, if your flow is automatically authenticating your customer’s identity using personally identifiable information (PII), you can use flow attributes to prevent the PII information from showing up in contact records or to an agent.

Amazon Connect now supports archiving and deleting flows from the flow designer UI, making it easier to manage flows that are not in use or no longer needed. For example, flows used only during certain times of the year can be archived when not in use and then unarchived when needed. When a flow has been archived, you can then permanently delete the flow so it is no longer available within your list of flows.

Customers can now use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager in the AWS Asia (Hyderabad) Region to automate the creation, sharing, copying, and retention of Amazon EBS Snapshots and EBS-backed AMIs via policies. Data Lifecycle Manager eliminates the need for complicated custom scripts to manage your EBS resources, saving you time and money.

Amazon Inspector now provides enhanced vulnerability intelligence as a part of its findings. The enhanced vulnerability intelligence includes names of known malware kits used to exploit a vulnerability, mapping to MITRE ATT&CK® framework, the date Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added the vulnerability to Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog (KVEC), Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS) score, and evidence of public events associated with a vulnerability. This expands the currently provided vulnerability intelligence such as Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score and known public exploit information. Inspector collects this information from internal Amazon research, CISA, and our partner, Recorded Future. You can access the enhanced vulnerability intelligence in the finding details within in the Amazon Inspector console

AWS CloudFormation launches a new deletion policy called RetainExceptOnCreate that provides customers additional control over CloudFormation behavior when resources are deleted from stacks. Customers use deletion policies to preserve or backup resources during accidental stack deletions. Today, customers can mark resources with a deletion policy of Retain, Snapshot, or Delete. Now, customers can use RetainExceptOnCreate to protect in-use resources from accidental deletion without preserving resources that have not served traffic. This allows customers to reduce manual intervention during retries of stack operations.

Wars are always a good opportunity to make money – governments will spend any money to win them – and it riled me that people are making shed-loads of wonga from the Russian imbroglio but not me, Ed confides to his diary. Then, through an old chip industry mate, I found this one-man  East End …

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Today, we are announcing the availability of VMware Cloud on AWS in AWS Europe (Zurich) region and AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) region. The addition of these 2 regions expands the availability of VMware Cloud on AWS to a total of 25 regions globally, enabling customers to have a faster and more efficient way to migrate to the cloud.