Smart Licensing is available on 2.7 as well. You can convert your existing licenses to a smart account and register ISE with smart licensing.

1. The update on April 11th will have no impact on ISE communication to Active Directory. That was the first urgent concern.2. We are still communicating with Active Directory on less secure protocols, that is a longer term open item that will be add...

This is picked up and being worked on. Please keep an eye on this bug's notifications.

Ideally.. Cisco recommends having the same timezone across the deployment. You can have your NTP servers located at various places but it does not have anything to do with the timezone.

IT doesn’t. You should be fine.