How many updates should your organization be processing in a year? And how much of that effort should still be manual?
These questions go beyond operations. They directly affect how quickly you respond to vulnerabilities, how much time your team spends on routine tasks, and how well your patch management process scales.
For many IT teams, patching quickly turns into a constant flow of updates that are difficult to track, prioritize, and deploy consistently. Without a clear point of reference, it’s hard to understand whether your process is efficient — or where improvements are needed.
In this article, we break down the updates processed by Apptimized Patch Management in 2025. To help you understand what a realistic patching workload looks like — and how much of it can actually be automated.
Updates Processed in 2025: What the Numbers Show
In 2025, Apptimized Care customers processed a total of ~1,200 updates across their environments.
At first glance, this number might seem straightforward. However, the way these updates are distributed reveals much more about how organizations actually manage patching in practice.
Here’s how the updates processed were handled:
These numbers highlight a clear trend. While teams still use manual downloads, most updates now move directly into endpoint management systems and rely increasingly on automation.
Why “Updates Processed” Matters More Than You Think
Looking at updates processed is not just about volume. It helps you understand how your patch management process performs in real conditions. When you compare your workload to real usage data, you can see whether your approach scales or creates hidden bottlenecks.
As the number of applications grows, patch management stops being a routine task and becomes a continuous operational process. Every update requires validation, compatibility checks, deployment decisions, and the ability to monitor results or roll back if something goes wrong. When teams handle this manually, even a moderate number of updates can quickly overwhelm them.
This is why how updates are processed matters just as much as how many there are. A higher volume of updates combined with automation enables faster responses to vulnerabilities, reduces repetitive work, and improves consistency. Heavy reliance on manual handling often leads to delays, higher risk exposure, and inconsistent results across environments.
Understanding this difference helps you evaluate your own setup more objectively — not based on assumptions, but on how patch management works in practice.
Automation and Platform Distribution: What the Data Really Shows
If you look beyond the total number of updates processed, the distribution itself reveals how patch management is actually structured in practice.
Most updates are no longer handled as standalone tasks. Instead, they are directly pushed into endpoint management systems — 463 through SCCM and 530 through Intune — with the majority of those deployments already automated. This indicates a clear shift in how updates are operationalized: not as individual actions, but as part of a continuous, system-driven workflow.
At the same time, the split between SCCM and Intune highlights another important reality. While Intune leads slightly in total updates processed, SCCM remains a significant part of the landscape. This suggests that many environments continue to operate across both platforms rather than relying on just one.
This becomes even more relevant in the context of Microsoft’s evolving approach to endpoint management. With Configuration Manager moving to an annual release cycle, as discussed in our article Intune Management Is the Future: ConfigMgr Goes Annual, the role of SCCM is changing, but clearly still present in day-to-day operations.
Manual Downloads: Where Automation Doesn’t Fully Replace Control
Despite the overall shift toward automated deployments, 260 updates in 2025 were still processed via download. This detail is easy to overlook, but it highlights an important aspect of how patch management works in practice.
Not every update fits into a fully automated workflow. There are situations where teams intentionally step outside of automation — whether to validate a package more carefully, handle a specific configuration, or maintain tighter control over how and when an update is introduced into the environment.
What this shows is that effective patch management is not about eliminating manual work entirely. Instead, it’s about reducing it to the points where it actually serves a purpose. When automation handles the majority of routine updates, manual effort can be focused on the cases that require closer attention.
Beyond Numbers: What Matters Next
While the number of updates processed is an important metric, it only shows part of the picture. On its own, volume doesn’t tell you whether your patch management process is truly effective or just keeping up.
The real shift happens when teams move beyond simply handling more updates and start improving how those updates are managed. This means gaining clearer visibility into existing vulnerabilities, having more control over how updates behave in different environments, and building confidence that deployments will work as expected without introducing new issues.
Automation plays a key role in this, but it mainly addresses speed and scale. It doesn’t remove the underlying complexity of patching. This is where additional capabilities — such as validation, customization, and continuous monitoring — become essential, helping teams move from reactive patching to a more controlled and predictable process.
Apptimized supports this process by adding the visibility, control, and validation needed to make patch management more predictable at scale.
Conclusion
The real value of looking at updates processed is not in the numbers themselves. It lies in what they reveal about how patch management works in practice. They give you a reference point — something concrete to compare your own process against.
Because in the end, the question is not whether updates are being deployed, but how reliably and predictably that process runs over time. When patching becomes consistent, controlled, and scalable, it stops being a constant operational challenge and becomes a stable part of your IT environment.
That shift is what ultimately defines whether a patch management process can keep up — not just with today’s workload, but with everything that comes next.