Evergreen Windows: the estate that never expires again

Blog August 2026

On 13 October 2026, Windows 11 24H2 reaches end of servicing for Home and Pro editions. Across the UK, steering groups are being convened and project codes opened to deal with it. Most of them are solving the wrong problem.

A deadline, not a migration

First, the facts. After 13 October 2026, devices running Windows 11 24H2 Home, Pro, Pro Education or Pro for Workstations stop receiving security updates. Enterprise and Education editions run longer, to October 2027, because business editions get 36 months of servicing rather than 24. Either way, anything still on 24H2 needs to move to a supported version, and the practical target is 25H2 or the imminent 26H2.

Now the part that changes everything. Windows 11 25H2, released in September 2025, arrived as an enablement package: a small download that switches on features already staged by ordinary monthly updates, completed with a single restart. 24H2, 25H2 and 26H2 share one servicing branch and the same binaries. At the time of writing, 26H2 has reached the Release Preview Channel and is expected to be generally available within weeks, again as an enablement package. Each new version simply resets the support clock, 24 months for consumer editions and 36 for Enterprise and Education, which carries 25H2 into October 2028.

The project mindset has expired

For twenty years, Windows versions were projects. XP to 7, 7 to 10, 10 to 11: hardware refresh, application compatibility programmes, imaging, floor walking, a closure report. Painful, but bounded. You finished, disbanded the team and did not think about it again for five years.

An enablement package removes the project without removing the obligation. There is no migration left to run, and there is also no finish line. Every machine in the estate now carries its own expiry date, permanently, and the only thing standing between you and an unsupported device is the operating rhythm you run every month. Estates that keep treating servicing as an occasional project accumulate stragglers, and stragglers are how a modern estate quietly rots.

When the version change is a restart, the project disappears. What replaces it is a rhythm, and a rhythm is only as good as its discipline.

Rings, deferrals and deadlines

The rhythm starts with update rings that mean something. A pilot ring of IT and friendly power users takes updates first. A broad ring follows after a sensible deferral, typically one to two weeks for quality updates and longer for feature updates. A final ring covers the machines that genuinely cannot tolerate surprises. Every ring carries a deadline and a forced restart grace period, because a deferral without a deadline is just an indefinite postponement with better branding. Windows Update for Business and Autopatch handle the mechanics well; the value lies in the ring design, the exception handling and the follow-through when a device misses its slot.

Test every cycle, not once per project

The old model tested applications once, at migration time, then hoped. The evergreen model tests every cycle. Before an update leaves the pilot ring, your business-critical applications, and for many organisations the Excel workbooks the business actually runs on, should be exercised against it in a dedicated environment that mirrors production. This is exactly why our managed services include automated application and Excel testing as a standing capability rather than a one-off exercise: the testing obligation now recurs with every cycle, so the test capability has to as well.

Name machines, not percentages

Percentage compliance is a comfort metric. Ninety-six per cent patched sounds fine until you notice the missing four per cent has been the same forty laptops for three months, two of them belonging to finance directors. Per-ring reporting should name machines: which devices took the update, which deferred, which failed and why, and who owns the remediation of each. Under our Infinity patching service that evidence lands monthly, machine by machine, which is also precisely what auditors and Cyber Essentials assessors want to see. Configuration drift detection belongs in the same bundle, because an estate can be fully patched and still wandering away from its intended state.

Hold a rolling 18-month roadmap

Finally, replace the migration plan with a rolling 18-month roadmap, refreshed quarterly. It should show when each Windows version leaves support for your editions, when the next enablement package lands in each ring, which hardware is ageing out of driver and firmware support, and how Microsoft 365 Apps servicing lines up alongside. Nothing on it is a project. Everything on it is a date the rhythm has to hit.

October's 24H2 deadline is not the last of its kind; it is simply the next beat. Organisations that internalise this stop commissioning migrations and start running an operating rhythm, in house or as a service. Either works. Having neither is the only genuinely expensive option.