Derek du Preez's coverage of Google Cloud Next '26 cuts to the decision that actually matters for agentic systems: who owns the audit and policy plane when your agents start acting on enterprise data. Not the model. Not the framework. The control layer.
He's right that value will accrue here, the same way it did with identity and observability in earlier cycles. His user's-agent-versus-data-owner's-agent framing maps cleanly onto federated identity thinking. Use it in your next architecture review.
What the piece undersells: every hyperscaler is making the same move. Vertex folding into Agent Platform, Bedrock AgentCore, Azure Foundry. The "neutral infrastructure" posture is gone. If you made a Vertex bet assuming it would stay a substrate, revisit it this quarter.
Three things to pressure-test on any agent architecture crossing your desk. Keep audit authority portable — the logs that matter during a breach shouldn't live only inside a vendor's control plane. Treat MCP and A2A as first-class architectural choices, not integration details. And interrogate "zero-copy" and "universal context" claims before they land in a slide; federation and semantic aggregation carry costs that rarely survive production.