Updated: July 27, 2020 (March 27, 2020)

  Analyst Report

Licensing Extended Security Updates

My Atlas / Analyst Reports

1,610 wordsTime to read: 9 min
Rob Horwitz by
Rob Horwitz

Rob Horwitz analyzes and writes about Microsoft licensing programs and product licensing rules. He also trains organizations on best Microsoft... more

  • Extended Security Update (ESU) subscriptions provide security updates and bulletins for old versions of SQL Server, Windows Server, and Windows.
  • ESUs help keep existing systems secure while they are being replaced.
  • ESUs will be expensive unless customers are migrating workloads to Azure.

Extended Security Update (ESU) subscriptions provide security updates and bulletins for versions 2008/2008 R2 of SQL Server and Windows Server, and in addition for Windows 7 Enterprise and Professional, for an additional three-year period after these product versions exited the Extended support life-cycle phase. Sold as Per-Device annual subscriptions, ESUs need to be purchased only for the subset of devices that continue to run the legacy software beyond the Extended support cutoff date.

What All Product ESUs Have in Common

Although some ESU details, such as prerequisites, vary depending on product (see below), several attributes are common across the three products that offer an ESU option.

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