Organizations continue to invest in modern endpoint management, but the daily work required to keep applications running tells a different story. According to Recast’s State of Intune in 2026 survey results, application lifecycle management remains one of the most persistent operational challenges facing IT teams. While respondents generally view Intune positively and report confidence in managing it, many are still spending significant time on manual processes related to packaging, patching, troubleshooting, and reporting.
Modern management hasn’t eliminated manual work
The survey reveals a striking reality: Manual effort is still consuming a substantial portion of the workweek for endpoint administrators. 65% percent of respondents spend between six and 15 hours each week on manual packaging, patching, troubleshooting, and reporting activities. An additional 22% spend more than 15 hours per week on those tasks.
These findings suggest that even as organizations adopt modern management tools, operational efficiency hasn’t kept pace. Teams may be managing devices in newer ways, but many of the processes surrounding applications remain labor intensive. The result is less time available for strategic projects, automation initiatives, and other modernization efforts.
Application packaging remains a major obstacle
Among all Intune challenges identified in the survey, application packaging and deployment ranked at the top for 37% of respondents. Third-party patching followed closely behind, reinforcing the central role that application management plays in day-to-day endpoint operations.
What’s notable is that packaging challenges aren’t limited to organizations early in their cloud journey. Many respondents have been using Intune for years and report overall satisfaction with the platform. Yet application deployment continues to be a source of operational friction that demands ongoing attention.
Manual packaging is the norm
One of the clearest signals in the survey is the continued reliance on manual packaging methods. Nearly half of respondents (49%) report manually packaging Win32 applications. By comparison, only 13% use automated packaging tools, while 18% rely on native Intune methods and 20% use third-party packaging services.
These numbers show that manual packaging remains the dominant approach for many organizations. That finding also helps explain why application packaging consistently emerges as a top challenge. When a core operational process depends heavily on manual work, scaling becomes difficult and administrative workloads increase.
Patching automation still has room to mature
The survey also found that third-party patching remains a significant concern. While nearly half of respondents say third-party patching is automated in their environment, another 42% report only partial automation. Ten percent say it isn’t automated at all
Those results indicate that many organizations are still navigating the transition from manual patching processes to more automated approaches. Partial automation can reduce workload, but it doesn’t eliminate the need for hands-on effort. As a result, patch management continues to consume valuable time and attention from busy endpoint teams.
Small teams are managing growing complexity
The staffing data adds important context to these challenges. Eighty-four percent of respondents report that between two and six people actively manage their Intune environment. At the same time, many describe their workloads as reactive or evenly split between reactive and proactive work.
That combination creates a difficult balancing act. Small teams are expected to support cloud migration efforts, security initiatives, Windows 11 rollouts, and ongoing endpoint management responsibilities while also handling repetitive application management tasks. When hours are consumed by packaging and patching work, it becomes harder to focus on longer-term improvements.
The challenge isn’t Intune. It’s the operational workload around it.
One of the most interesting findings in the survey is that satisfaction with Intune remains high. Eighty-one percent of respondents describe themselves as somewhat or very satisfied with their experience managing the platform. At the same time, many still lose hours each week to manual operational tasks.
Those findings aren’t contradictory. Instead, they point to a larger challenge within modern endpoint management. Organizations see value in Intune and continue moving forward with cloud adoption, but application lifecycle management remains heavily dependent on manual effort. Packaging, deployment, and patching continue to require significant attention, creating an operational burden that many teams have yet to overcome.
As the State of Intune in 2026 survey results make clear, application lifecycle management is one of the biggest operational challenges in IT today. Until organizations find more scalable ways to manage application complexity, manual work will continue to consume time that teams could otherwise spend driving innovation and modernization.
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Right Click Tools Patching is heavily focused on patching, compliance, and integration with Microsoft ConfigMgr and Intune, making it a strong fit for environments that already rely on Microsoft’s endpoint management solutions for application deployment and patching.
Application Workspace takes a broader approach focused on application delivery, lifecycle control, and self-service, working alongside Intune, ConfigMgr, and VDI platforms. Both end users and IT teams get a better experience.
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