Hybrid Connectivity

by
Rob Helm

by
Rob Helm

As managing vice president, Rob Helm covers Microsoft collaboration services and client software. His 25-plus years of experience analyzing Microsoft’s... more

Hybrid Connectivity services enable customers to connect their sites, users, and devices to Azure, and to one another through Azure networking services. The Azure VPN Gateway virtual private networking service faces the most change both near-term and long-term.

Product: Hybrid Connectivity

Near Term (2026-2027)

VPN Gateway: SSTP shutdown in Mar. 31, 2027. Azure VPN Gateways will no longer support the SSTP protocol starting Mar. 31, 2027. SSTP is a proprietary protocol that VPN Gateway used for SSL VPNs. VPN Gateway customers should migrate to other protocols (OpenVPN and IKEv2/IPSec) by the deadline.

VPN Gateway: Automatic AZ migration starts Sept. 2026. VPN Gateways that don’t have Availability Zone (AZ) failover will migrate to tiers with the feature starting in Sept. 2026. AZ failover enables gateways to survive local data center failures by cutting over to an instance in an unaffected part of the datacenter. The change applies only to the Basic tier and five numbered tiers (VPNGw1 to VPNGw5), which Microsoft stopped selling in Sept. 2025. The automatic migration should not cause downtime), but customers might have to manually migrate gateways where automatic migration fails.