Microsoft has published its May 2025 Azure Sphere Services update. Microsoft Azure Sphere is an Internet of Things (IoT) platform that helps to keep devices secure. It integrates hardware, software, and cloud components to ensure high-level security from your chip to the cloud.
This month’s updates include the ability to pause or re-enable Legacy access, there’s a change to expired certificate download behavior, and you can now block devices from receiving Azure Sphere issued certificates. The Redmond giant also mentioned that this update doesn’t include any operating system or SDK updates.
With this May update, Microsoft now allows you to pause or resume Azure Sphere (Legacy) tenant operations using the Azure portal to help with migrations to Azure Sphere (Integrated). The Windows maker is planning to retire the Legacy version on 27 September 2027 and users must eventually migrate, this ability to pause helps with this.
As of this release, any new Azure Sphere catalogs will have Legacy access paused by default. However, any catalogs created by integrating an existing Azure Sphere Legacy tenant will carry on having Legacy access switched on by default, enabling migration to occur without disruption.
Regarding the change to expired certificate download behavior, Azure Sphere Services will no longer let you download expired tenant/catalog certificates. Commenting on this, Microsoft said that this change doesn’t impact production use cases as those certificates are already expired. It did say, however, that the metadata for those certificates is available when looking at your tenant/catalog’s list of certificates, but requests for the certificate body via the Legacy CLI, Integrated CLI, and Portal will give you a “null” or “not found” response.
Finally, you now have the ability to block devices from receiving Azure Sphere-issued certificates by making a support request. Microsoft said this could be useful if devices get lost or are stolen, or if an organization wants to decommission a device. If you need to block any devices, you should contact Microsoft at: azsppgsup@microsoft.com.