Hammer Weekly Update, week ending 1 February 2026

Week ending 1 February 2026 put attention on security, cloud, networking, infrastructure and AI in UK and EMEA. We’ve boiled it down to the few stories with practical impact - and concrete steps partners can take this week.

Open-source AI is a global security nightmare waiting to happen, say researchers

The Register (Security) reports: Open-source AI is a global security nightmare waiting to happen, say researchers. Also, South Korea gets a pentesting F, US Treasury says bye bye to BAH, North Korean hackers evolve… [1]

Controls must stand up to real phishing and ransomware drills, not just policy-recovery points and identity boundaries are the failure points. Hammer can bundle Microsoft 365 backup and a managed SOC handover into a repeatable rollout plan with timelines.

Run a restore test from an immutable backup set and record RTO.
Map MFA and conditional access coverage for high-risk apps.
Stage a 30-minute phishing drill and time the run-book.

Amazon RDS now supports IPv6 for VPC endpoints of RDS Service APIs

AWS What’s New reports: Amazon RDS now supports IPv6 for VPC endpoints of RDS Service APIs. Amazon RDS now supports Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) for VPC endpoints of RDS Service APIs, in addition to the existing IPv6 support for public endpoints. [2]

Guardrails around identity, network and spend need to ship with the platform-landing zones and budgets should be codified, not manual. Hammer can package a baseline landing zone with budget alerts and ownership mapping so teams can deploy it the same way every time.

Codify a landing zone (identity, network, logging) and deploy to all accounts.
Enable budget alerts/anomaly detection and assign owners.
Right-size or schedule off non-prod instances before month-end.

Amazon GameLift Streams expands streaming capability to six new regions

AWS What’s New reports: Amazon GameLift Streams expands streaming capability to six new regions. Starting today, Amazon GameLift Streams provides streaming capabilities in six new locations - eu-west-2 (London)… [3]

Latency to inspection points and PoP reach now shape experience as much as raw bandwidth; failover timing needs timing, not theory. Hammer can align SASE/SD-WAN SKUs to branch counts and lead times, and sequence rollouts to avoid link flap surprises.

Measure user latency to the nearest SASE PoP and capture variance.
Pilot split-tunnel policies for collaboration apps; record packet loss.
Time branch failover under controlled link flap.

History repeats itself in Post Office Capture redress scheme with low-ball offers made

Computer Weekly reports: History repeats itself in Post Office Capture redress scheme with low-ball offers made. Early signs show that former Post Office Capture users face derisory initial compensation offers and face impossible appeals process [4]

Tie architecture to measurable outcomes and test the thing you depend on before go-live.

Define the measurable outcome; ship the smallest change that proves it.

Police Digital Service future remains uncertain as ‘radical’ Home Office policing reform unveiled

Computer Weekly reports: Police Digital Service future remains uncertain as ‘radical’ Home Office policing reform unveiled. The UK government’s long-awaited ‘radical’ policing reform whitepaper has finally dropped… [5]

Expect pressure on rack density, GPU power budgets and memory bandwidth; design choices affect UPS/PDU loading and cooling headroom.

Model peak rack draw; confirm UPS/PDU headroom for target density.
Benchmark NVMe throughput against expected inference concurrency.
Lock delivery dates for AI servers to align with cooling changes.