Starting this evening, we’ll be rolling out a new BITS policy. BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service) is the Windows feature that controls background downloads such as Windows or Office Updates.

This updated policy will be replacing a 10+ year old policy, with the key difference being that we’ll be enabling local subnet peer to peer traffic to reduce overall bandwidth requirements for external sites. This evening (11/8) we’ll be rolling out the new policy to AES sites, and assuming no issues result, Extension sites a week from today (11/15). The master ticket for this change (along with more technical specifics) can be found here.

As a reminder, a general overview of all our fleet wide group policies can be found here.