Most enterprises will now adopt a once-a-year upgrade model for Windows 10, finally getting some relief from the pressure of seemingly endless rounds of testing and deployment, a Windows expert said today.

"I think enterprises will fall into an annual cadence," Stephen Kleynhans, a Gartner research vice president, said in an interview. "With 30 months of support, you get to choose when to start rolling out [the upgrade]. You may say, 'We'll start kicking tires in January, piloting in March, deploying in June.' That's a nice window."

[ Related: Windows 10 October 2018 Update: Key enterprise features ]

Kleynhans was referring to the changes he expects enterprises to make following Microsoft's announcement last week that it is extending support of Windows 10 Enterprise and Windows 10 Education to 30 months. The additional support – previously maxed out at 18 months – will be awarded only to the fall feature upgrade, the one each year labeled xx09 in Microsoft's yymm format. Windows 10 Enterprise 1809 (and the matching Education edition), slated to release later this month or early in October, will be the first to get two-and-a-half years of security patches and non-security bug fixes.

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