In February 2026, Recast surveyed IT professionals across education, government, healthcare, finance, MSPs, and more to understand where organizations stand with ConfigMgr, Intune, and OS Deployment today.
The results are a snapshot of an industry mid-transition: MDT is gone, cloud-only isn’t enough, and SysAdmins are actively looking for tools to make things easier.
Who responded: Eighty-four SysAdmins. Eighty percent manage 1,000+ endpoints, and 34% manage more than 10,000.
Executive summary
- Although 99% say OSD is important (81% high or critical), 18% still rely on WDS or recently retired MDT for bare-metal OSD, making replacement planning urgent.
- Teams are moving to modern management (48% Intune-only, 40% hybrid), but key pain points remain: maintenance overhead, driver management, speed, and cost.
- OSDCloud shows strong production trust (50% adoption, 47% regular use), and the immediate path forward is to audit MDT dependencies, test OSDCloud, and close Autopilot OSD gaps.
MDT is retired—but not everyone has moved on
Microsoft officially retired MDT in January 2026. Once the VBScript component is removed from Windows 11 releases (expected in 2027), MDT will be unable to deploy new Windows 11 versions.
Despite that timeline, 18% of respondents are still using MDT or Windows Deployment Services (WDS) for bare-metal OSD today. That’s a meaningful share of organizations that will need to find a replacement within the next six to 12 months.
With 81% of respondents rating bare-metal or disaster recovery OSD as having a high or critical importance, the urgency is real. Organizations leaning on a retired tool for a critical workflow face compounding risk the longer they wait.
The top OSD pain points: Maintenance, drivers, speed, and cost
When asked about their biggest OSD frustrations, respondents were consistent:
| Challenge | Respondents |
| Maintenance overhead | 28% |
| Driver management | 25% |
| Speed | 20% |
| Cost | 11% |
These aren’t new problems, but they’re persistent ones. The common thread: SysAdmins want OSD to be less work, not more, especially as environments grow more complex.
Full OSD remains non-negotiable
Cloud-only environments create a common assumption that imaging and bare-metal deployment are legacy concerns. The survey data says otherwise.
Ninety-nine percent of respondents said bare-metal or disaster recovery OSD is important—with 81% calling it a high or critical priority. The use cases driving that are practical and urgent:
- Ransomware recovery: A device that needs a full wipe and rebuild, not just a reset.
- Hardware upgrades: Re-image from a new disk (hardware failure or upgrade).
- Production imaging at scale: Deploying OS builds reliably across large fleets with custom images.
These are scenarios where a misconfigured or missing OSD capability has a direct business impact.
Intune adoption is high—and creating new OSD gaps
The survey reflects a clear migration trend:
- 48% of respondents are now in Intune-only environments
- 40% are running a hybrid mix of ConfigMgr and Intune
The challenge is that OSD and imaging workflows don’t map 1:1 from ConfigMgr to Intune. Autopilot handles provisioning for new devices in Intune, but it wasn’t designed for bare-metal rebuild or disaster recovery scenarios. Organizations moving to cloud management still need a way to handle those cases.
OSDCloud adoption is growing, and for good reason
Fifty percent of respondents already use OSDCloud for bare-metal OS Deployment, and 47% use it regularly in production environments. That level of production adoption reflects genuine trust earned over time, not just evaluation interest.
OSDCloud is built to address the exact gaps the survey surfaced. It reduces maintenance overhead, handles driver management automatically, and works across ConfigMgr, hybrid, and Intune-only environments. It’s a practical bridge for teams navigating the transition away from MDT.
What to do next
If your organization is still running MDT, the window to plan a replacement is narrowing. Here are a few concrete steps:
- Audit your bare-metal OSD dependency. Identify which workflows still rely on MDT or WDS and how often they’re used in production.
- Evaluate OSDCloud in a test environment. With 50% of survey respondents already using it, there’s a strong community and a well-documented path to adoption.
- Map your Intune gaps. If you’re moving to cloud management, document which OSD scenarios Autopilot doesn’t cover. Those are your risk areas.
The organizations that are managing this transition well aren’t waiting for MDT to break. They’re planning now.
OSDCloud is trusted to support the journey
OSDCloud by Recast supports the transition from ConfigMgr to hybrid to cloud, helping SysAdmins improve maintenance and driver management workloads in a way that reduces time and cost. Many are using OSDCloud in production, underscoring user trust in the tool.
The OSD suite of tools simplifies operating system deployment, from bare-metal reimaging to fully cloud-native provisioning. These tools help administrators automate and customize their OS processes with ease. With growing complexity in device provisioning with Autopilot, SCCM, and the newly retired MDT, OSDCloud fills critical needs and delivers the flexibility required by IT teams today.
Recast conducted this survey in February 2026. N=84 IT professionals across education, government, healthcare, finance, MSPs, and other industries.
