Beyond Deployment: Why Visibility Now Defines Patch Success

The state of play in IT has changed irrevocably.

From the constantly-evolving threat of cybercrime to the advent of cloud computing and remote working, a modern organization’s technological environment is almost unrecognizable from what it was at the turn of the decade.

Patch management is no stranger to this transition. Once considered a reactive, manual process, patching is no longer a practice that businesses can simply afford to run as and when needed.

However, while many businesses today recognize the need to evolve their practices, the way we define “success” in patch management also needs to change to match the challenges we now face.

In this article, we’ll explain why the patching process no longer ends at deployment, and how visibility is the key to success.

Patch management has come a long way

It wasn’t too long ago that patching practices were reactive, manual and entirely ad hoc. Visibility across devices was unheard of, testing was limited, and updates were often only rolled out after a vulnerability had already been exploited.

The process of patching was also decentralized. IT professionals were walking from device to device, each with their own approach to handling updates, leading to glaring inconsistencies across an infrastructure.

Thanks to unified endpoint management (UEM) solutions like Microsoft Intune, today’s approach to patch management is far more streamlined, consistent and compliant:

• Deployment is automated, decreasing the risk of human error and the time between release and deployment. This subsequently reduces the window of potential vulnerability.
• Policy updates can be scheduled for specific, off-peak hours to reduce impact on users and business operations.
• Consolidated dashboards and reporting create a single source of truth from which teams can make strategic decisions, while also reducing the amount of time it would take to manually check different systems.
• Cloud-first architecture enables scalability across a wider array of endpoints, along with simplified maintenance and global distribution that minimizes delays.
• Security and compliance integration brings these key considerations into the patch management process, ensuring it acts as a proactive response to cyber threats, not a reactive one.

Innovations like these have moved patch management practices forward significantly – yet the environments that enterprises work in have expanded faster than anyone could have imagined.

Visibility gaps are growing

Even with solid deployment infrastructure in place, patch management is still a process fraught with risks – from extended downtime to blind spots and security vulnerabilities.

There are several reasons for this. Today’s IT environments are infinitely more complex than they were even a few years ago. Flexible work practices have increased the number of devices in play, while dynamic, fragmented networks make it harder to enforce policies and ensure compliance.

This complexity comes with serious consequences. Three-quarters (75%) of businesses fail to apply patches promptly, and when unpatched software leads to a data breach, organizations face an average cost of $4 million.

The challenge is only intensifying, with our Software Vulnerability Ratings Report revealing a 61% surge in discovered vulnerabilities in 2024.

The issue isn’t just the sheer number of devices – it’s the lack of visibility teams have into the status of devices across an enterprise. Even with tools like Microsoft Intune in place, critical gaps remain.

Some of the most common blind spots include:

1. Remote devices

There’s no avoiding the headache that remote working creates for IT teams. For all of its benefits, flexible models bring a new array of complex security challenges – particularly when it comes to personal or BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policies.

Personal devices used for work purposes don’t offer IT admins the same level of visibility or control as fully managed endpoints in tools like Microsoft Intune. Updates can’t be reliably pushed to these devices, nor can they be tracked – users can even uninstall security software if they wish.

This effectively leaves the responsibility for patching in the hands of the employee –  one of the most common points of failure in organizational security.

2. Devices that are intermittently connected

An organization might be able to secure devices that are consistently online, but those that connect only occasionally can easily slip through the cracks.

These devices can miss scheduled updates – something that applications like Microsoft Intune may not detect until the device reconnects. By then, the gap may already have exposed the organization to risk.

3. Off-VPN devices

To receive real-time updates and patches, a device needs to be connected to the organization’s VPN. Without this connection, IT teams can’t ensure a device is up to date with security baselines and policy changes, or push necessary updates. As with intermittently connected devices, Intune may only pick up on this after the fact.

4. Third-party applications

Third-party applications can create significant blind spots beyond the visibility of UEM solutions like Microsoft Intune. Unless they’re set to update automatically, they may operate in ways that fall outside of an organization’s security policies.

This includes common business applications like Zoom and Google Chrome, as well as unauthorized and manually installed software – which may pose even greater risk.

5. Silent failures or partial installs

Not all patches land cleanly. Installations may fail silently or only complete partially, creating a false sense of security.

These blind spots delay remediation and make it more difficult to identify the root cause of patching issues – undermining IT’s ability to maintain a consistent security posture.

The cost of incomplete insight

Patching blind spots might seem small – a single laptop here, an overlooked app there – but they carry significant consequences in terms of security, cost and time.

Without visibility into the patch status of every endpoint, IT teams are left to fill the gaps manually. This means reverting to time-consuming, error-prone tasks like manual verification, report reconciliation, and support ticket resolution – the very kinds of inefficiencies tools like Microsoft Intune aim to eliminate.

The impact becomes even clearer when looking at where attackers are focusing. Our Software Vulnerability Ratings Report found that exploited vulnerabilities in web browsers surged dramatically over the past year. Google Chrome alone saw a 1,840% increase, jumping from 5 to 97 exploited vulnerabilities, while Microsoft Office experienced a 433% rise, from 6 to 32.

These are precisely the kinds of applications that frequently fall into visibility gaps – especially when they’re installed outside of IT policy or not configured to update automatically.

The result? More time lost, more resources drained, and greater exposure to risk. Here’s what that looks like in practice:

1. Longer vulnerability windows

Manually verify patch success extends the timeframe in which devices remain exposed. These processes are also prone to human error, increasing the chance that critical vulnerabilities will go unnoticed.

2. Slower compliance or audit reporting

Compliance failures bear significant financial and reputational risks. When patch status across Intune blind spots must be confirmed manually, reporting becomes slower and less reliable.

3. Increased workload for already-stretched IT teams

Burnout has been described as ‘a chronic epidemic’ in the IT industry. A survey of 1,500 IT professionals found 58% feel overwhelmed by their daily responsibilities. Adding manual patch verification only compounds the pressure.

4. Strategic uncertainty around what is and isn’t secure

Time-to-remediate is a crucial metric for IT teams. The longer a vulnerability goes undiscovered, the more time there is for it to be exploited. At the same time, if businesses lack certainty on what is and isn’t secure, this can delay decision-making and slow down response times.

Even in well-run environments, all of these gaps introduce risk, drain resources, and erode trust in the patching process.

Patch management does not end at deployment

Is deployment still the finish line in patch management?

There’s a strong argument that an IT team’s responsibility no longer ends once a patch is pushed. With such a complex IT environment to navigate, teams are now left asking:

• Did the patch install successfully?
• What about third-party apps?
• Are any devices still vulnerable?

Solutions like Intune have already modernized deployment, but they can’t fully answer these questions alone.

The next step in evolving patch management is achieving visibility into outcomes: what happened after the patch was pushed? Did it land? Did it fail? Did it apply everywhere it needed to?

The solution isn’t to rip and replace, but to find complementary tools for your existing endpoint management solution – tools that can enhance the organization’s decision-making and proactive response time by enriching information and delivering greater visibility.

The ideal tool in question would deliver clear, actionable insight into patch status across all devices, locations, and applications – even if an endpoint is deactivated, or an application is outside of that tool’s remit.

Because in today’s distributed, fast-moving environments, deployment alone isn’t enough. True patch management success depends on knowing what happened after the patch went out – and being equipped to act when it didn’t land as expected.

Visibility is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s the difference between assuming you’re secure and knowing you are.