On Premises
The latest On Premises coverage — news, analysis, and updates from the WindowsNews.AI desk.
Azure Arc’s Auto Agent Upgrade Arrives in Public Preview, Automating Hybrid Server Patch Management
Microsoft has quietly shifted hybrid server management from a manual chore to policy-driven automation with the public preview of Auto Agent Upgrade for Azure Arc-enabled servers, a feature that...
Microsoft’s Azure Investigation: How Unit 8200’s Surveillance Tests Cloud Sovereignty
Microsoft has launched an urgent external investigation into allegations that Israel’s signals intelligence Unit 8200 used its Azure cloud platform to store and process millions of intercepted...
October 2025 Deadline: Microsoft Ends Access 2016 and 2019 Support With No Extended Security Updates
As of October 14, 2025, Microsoft will permanently cut off security updates and technical support for Access 2016 and Access 2019, leaving organizations with unsupported database applications facing...
Azure Arc for Hyper-V: A Practical Guide to Onboarding, Remote Management, and Trade-offs
Microsoft's hybrid management platform Azure Arc can now treat on-premises Hyper-V hosts and their virtual machines as first-class Azure resources, opening a direct channel to cloud-native services...
Microsoft’s WSUS Deprecation Paves the Way for Azure Arc Hybrid Patch Management
The September 2024 announcement that Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) is deprecated didn’t just mark the end of a familiar on‑premises patching tool — it forced thousands of organizations...
AWS’s Hardware, Azure’s Management, Google’s Kubernetes: The Multicloud Battle in 2025
In 2025, the choice of cloud provider isn’t just about which services you consume; it’s about which operational philosophy you adopt. The three hyperscalers — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft...
Microsoft’s Azure Update Manager: Hotpatching and Dynamic Scoping Arrive, But Rollback Gaps Remain
Enterprise Windows patch management is undergoing a seismic shift as Microsoft retires its legacy update orchestration tools and funnels administrators toward Azure Update Manager (AUM), a service...
Microsoft’s Brad Smith Vows Investigation After Employees Storm Office Over Azure Israel Surveillance Claims
Microsoft President Brad Smith told reporters on August 26, 2025, that the company would “go investigate and get to the truth” after a group of current and former employees occupied his Redmond...
FFmpeg's First AI Filter Delivers On-Device Whisper Transcription
FFmpeg, the open-source Swiss Army knife of multimedia processing, now speaks. A freshly merged whisper audio filter brings OpenAI’s Whisper model directly into FFmpeg’s filter graph, enabling...
Microsoft Releases Agentless VMware-to-Hyper-V Migration Tool in Windows Admin Center Preview
Microsoft has shipped a public preview of a native VM Conversion extension for Windows Admin Center, taking aim at one of the most stubborn challenges in datacenter operations: moving virtual...
CISA Adds Actively Exploited Trend Micro Apex One Zero-Day to KEV, Mandates Rapid Patching
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added CVE-2025-54948, a critical command injection vulnerability in Trend Micro’s Apex One on-premises management console, to...
Microsoft for Startups Helps Bria Bring Legally Safe AI Image Generation to Azure Developers
Bria, the visual generative AI startup that trains exclusively on licensed data, has plugged its platform into Microsoft Azure’s ecosystem via the Microsoft for Startups program. The move gives...