Rebecca Lewis wants to save you later heartache:
‘Informational message’ and ‘Further action is only required if Kerberos authentication is required’… For years, we could ignore this, but not anymore. Microsoft published a three-phase roadmap on January 28, 2026 to disable NTLM by default in upcoming Windows releases — and phase one is already live. That ‘informational message’ is about to become an action-item.
In most environments I audit, somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of Windows Authentication connections to SQL Server are running on NTLM — and nobody knew until we looked. If you have not checked yours, now is the time.
Read on to learn how you can check this, the kinds of problems that can prevent Kerberos authentication, and how you can fix them.