You can pretty much disable any services in Windows with Group Policy. Below is an example for a Windows 2008 AD environment.

1. Open the “Group Policy Manager” under the Administrator Tools (You might need to do this in a domain controller)

2. Create a new GPO or edit your default one.

3. Edit the GPO by right clicking the policy for the “Edit” option

4. Expand the “Computer Configuration” -> “Policies”-> “Windows Components” -> “Windows Updates”

5. Here you will find all the settings for the Windows Updates service, look for the “Configure Automatic Update” and disable it.

6. Exit out and now you have a policy that will disable the Windows Update feature in Windows.