Some Azure AI terms added around “the use of First-Party Consumption services and the use of Web Knowledge Sources while using Grounding with Bing services”.
Microsoft 365 E3 added as the prerequisite for Microsoft eDiscovery Graph API Standard
Terms added following the recent updates around Teams:
“This Notice applies to customers in the European Economic Area (EEA) who purchase through Microsoft’s commercial licensing programs with a billing account that is in the EEA.
Such customers have the right to purchase (no Teams) Suites (and those in multi-year agreements may switch to (no Teams) Suites at their next annual order) at a price below the price of the corresponding Covered Suites. Customers are also eligible to receive the same percentage discount (whether negotiated or offered as a promotion and whether implemented as a price reduction or as a rebate) on the (no Teams) Suites that is offered on the corresponding Covered Suites. These (no Teams) Suites may be used with competitors to Teams if the customer purchases a competing solution.
Rebranded Microsoft 365 E5 Security (and all relevant offers) to Microsoft Defender Suite Rebranded Microsoft E5 Compliance (and all relevant offers) to Microsoft Purview Suite
M365 E5 Security = Microsoft Defender Suite M365 E5 Compliance = Microsoft Purview Suite
M365 F5 Security = Microsoft Defender Suite FLW M365 F5 Compliance = Microsoft Purview Suite FLW
There is also a “Defender + Purview Suite FLW” SKU
FLW = FrontLine Worker
As always, there’s going to be a period of time where the names differ between pages, sites, documents etc. so be prepared…especially for renewals.
2) Removed Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence from Availability and Prerequisite Tables
3) Azure Firmware Analysis and Azure IoT Operations connectors added
1 The backfill feature automatically adds historic data into a Storage Discovery workspace from before the workspace is created. 2 Every workspace retains insights for some time to allow for historical analysis.
The total cost will be comprised of:
Pricing plan
Workspace configuration
Number of storage resources & data objects analysed
Note that a storage resource can be included in multiple workspaces and will be charged in each one.
How much will all this cost? As the service is in Preview, and you’re able to use it for free, Microsoft haven’t released pricing details. These will become available on Azure.com before October 1, 2025, when billing kicks in.
To find out more about what it does and how it works, head here.
Visual Studio Subscriptions have been added to MCA
Windows 10 ESU added to CSP
Microsoft Defender & Microsoft Purview Suites have now been made available to Business Premium users
That last point is very interesting as this brings a world of new security features to smaller organisations – which will have multiple impacts:
1) directly increase the ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) of SMB customers as they buy new add-ons 2) increase the chances of SMB customers adopting Copilot – as these new products address many of the security/data challenges… 2b) which will further increase the ARPU of SMB customers
Microsoft have long been calling out the strength of SMB driving M365 sales so this is a logical next step.
Are you a Microsoft EA customer with Online Services at Level B, C, or D pricing?
From November 1st, 2025:
“Microsoft will expand the set of products that have a single consistent price across Price Levels A-D to include all online services” on EA and MPSA agreements.”
The new pricing will be the same as on the Microsoft site once the waterfall discounts are removed.
This will take effect from your next renewal, or when you buy Online Services not on your CPS, post November 1st.
On-premises software pricing isn’t changing.
This is going to cause a lot of Microsoft bills to increase significantly – be prepared!
Exchange Server 2016 & 2019 and Skype for Business Server 2016 & 2019 go out of support in October 2025 (4 months at the time of writing).
The new Subscription editions have been announced as Generally Available by Microsoft (although not yet added to the Product Terms) but not all organisations are ready to make the move. To help with that, from August 1st, 2025, customers can contact their Microsoft account teams to purchase a 6-month Extended Security Update (ESU).
What to know
Any Critical/Important Security Updates released after the end of support will be privately provided to ESU customers.
Microsoft are not committing to release any updates during the ESU period.
The ESU will run for 6 months until April 14th, 2026 and – in Microsoft’s somewhat snarky words – “This period will not be extended past April 2026 (you do not need to ask).”
I get a lot of questions about ITAM, SaaS, & FinOps tools – what is available, what do they do, which are the best etc.
The ITAM market has quite a few tools, there are several SaaS tools, and the FinOps tool market is huge…unnecessarily so some may say. This presents (at least) 2 problems:
Potential customers are overwhelmed and don’t know where to start
Genuinely innovative tools can be lost in a sea of marketing and promotion
In an attempt to help bring some clarity, I’ve started a crowd-sourced tool list here:
that currently contains 147 records…this has increase by 14% in the last 2 weeks!
The initial aim is to have a centrally available list of all the tools with some high level categorisation i.e. “SAM”, “FinOps”, “AWS only” etc. From there, I hope to add more info to help people dig deeper. Let me know what would be helpful for you!
If you think I’ve missed any – please add them here:
With the upcoming release of SQL Server 2025, there will not be a new version of SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). Instead, Power BI Report Server will be the default – offering new features including PBIX reports, data modelling, and custom visuals.
The Microsoft announcement states that “when SQL Server 2025 becomes generally available, any customer with a paid SQL Server license will have access to Power BI Report Server (PBRS) ” while PBRS was previously limited to Enterprise edition customers with Software Assurance.
Power BI Report Server (PBIRS) installation requires keys from SQL Server 2025 and later versions. For SQL Server 2022 (16.x) and previous versions, access to PBIRS is limited to customers with SQL Server Enterprise edition and Software Assurance (SA), who can use a PBIRS key provided by Microsoft.
You don’t have to transition immediately if you don’t want to as SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) 2022 will continue to receive security updates and support through January 11, 2033.
The announcement (with other SQL 2025 info) is here and there is more info here too.
Microsoft announce new cloud options for Europe. There is an increasing push back from European organisations, particularly Government, against so many critical services and so much data all being run out of the US…this has been accelerated by the current geo-political situation too.
These announcements are Microsoft’s attempt to pre-emptively stem the flow of European customers away from their cloud services.
Altogether we’ve got:
Sovereign Public Cloud
Sovereign Private Cloud
National Partner Clouds
Microsoft 365 Local
Data Guardian
External Key Management
Regulated Environment Management
Microsoft 365 Local is interesting but the MS announcement only talks about productivity workloads like Exchange Server & SharePoint Server. Does M365 Local include Teams, Stream, ClipChamp, Planner etc.? 🤷♂️
Sovereign Public Cloud
Will be offered across all existing European datacentre regions, for all European customers, across enterprise services such as Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Security and Power Platform.
Customer data stays in Europe, under European Law, with operations and access controlled by European personnel, and encryption is under full control of customers.
Sovereign Private Cloud
Will support critical collaboration, communication and virtualization services workloads on Azure Local. This solution now integrates Microsoft 365 Local and the security platform with Azure Local, providing consistent capabilities for hybrid or air-gapped environments to meet resiliency and business continuity requirements
National Partner Clouds
Available in France (Bleu) & Germany (Delos Cloud), these will offer comprehensive capabilities of Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure in an independently owned and operated environment.
Microsoft 365 Local
Microsoft 365 Local provides customers with additional choice by bringing together Microsoft’s productivity server software into an Azure Local environment that can run entirely in a customer’s own datacentre.
This provides a simplified deployment and management framework for organizations to run Microsoft’s trusted productivity servers in environments they fully control. It remains to be seen exactly what is included and how the licensing works…
Data Guardian
Data Guardian will add an additional level of assurance by ensuring that only Microsoft personnel residing in Europe control remote access to these systems and adds additional human and technical oversight whenever engineers outside of Europe need access.
All remote access by Microsoft engineers to the systems that store and process your data in Europe is approved and monitored by European resident personnel in real time and will be logged in a tamper-evident ledger.
External Key Management
With external key management, customers can connect Azure to keys stored on their own Hardware Security Module (HSM) on-premises or hosted by a trusted third party.
Regulated Environment Management
The Regulated Environment Management service will allow customers to easily manage all these features in one place (for instance, configuring Data Guardian policies or reviewing access log entries).
It’s the Microsoft Product Terms for June 2025 and, as you’d expect in the last month of the FY, not too much has changed.
Clarification that it’s Cloud Add-ons to SA that must be acquired on the same agreement as the base license…rather than all SLs that have a pre-requisite license.
Azure App Service plan added to MCA.
Clarification that Entra ID Governance for External Identities may be used only for External Users. <– This seems like it’s closing a loophole that customers may have been using.
Copilot Studio added as a “covered product” to the Customer Copyright Commitment.
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 