Microsoft Autopatch feature to make Patch Tuesday 'just another Tuesday' for enterprises
The upcoming feature will apply patches automatically
Microsoft is to launch a new service called Windows Autopatch, which will automatically keep Windows and Office software up-to-date.
The company says that customers who currently have a Windows 10/11 Enterprise E3 or above licence will be able to use the new feature at no additional cost.
Microsoft will introduce the Autopatch feature in July this year, enabling enterprise customers to obtain Windows 10 and Windows 11 systems quality and feature updates for drivers, firmware and Microsoft 365 Apps like Teams, Word, Excel and Outlook.
Presently, the second Tuesday of every month, which has come to be known as Patch Tuesday, is a busy day for Microsoft users in terms of software upgrades. However, Microsoft claims that with the introduction of Windows Autopatch, Patch Tuesday will become "just another Tuesday".
Windows Autopatch will be compatible with all supported versions of Windows 10, Windows 11 and Windows 365 for Enterprise.
However, it will not work on Windows Server OS and Windows 365 for Business.
Lior Bela, senior product marketing manager at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post that the service will automatically keep Windows and Office applications on enrolled endpoints up-to-date, at no extra cost.
The managed service will work by rolling out the updates to a small number of devices before increasing their availability to more machines.
Updates will be applied across four deployment rings in a corporate network.
A small set of "test" ring will be used to get things started, before moving to the "first" ring which is slightly larger, containing one per cent of all devices under management.
According to Microsoft, the "fast" ring comprises around nine per cent of all endpoints, while the remainder of the devices are allocated to the "wide" ring.
"The population of these rings is managed automatically, so as devices come and go, the rings maintain their representative samples. Since every organisation is unique, though, the ability to move specific devices from one ring to another is retained by enterprise IT admins," Bela added.
The strategy appears to be similar to Microsoft's gradual roll-outs of Windows 10 based on machine learning analysis of hardware and drivers.
Autopatch also includes capabilities such as Halt and Rollback, which will prevent updates from being pushed to higher rings or rolled back automatically, respectively.
"Whenever issues arise with any Autopatch update, the remediation gets incorporated and applied to future deployments, affording a level of proactive service that no IT admin team could easily replicate. As Autopatch serves more updates, it only gets better," Bela said.
Customers who want to use Windows Autopatch must have Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), Microsoft's Intune mobile device management service, and be running compatible versions of Windows 10 or 11.
While Windows Autopatch does not require any special hardware, the current hardware requirements will still apply.
For example, in order to deploy Windows 11 to Autopatch devices, those devices must meet the necessary hardware specifications for Win 11. As a result, Windows devices must be supported by a hardware OEM.