Intune satisfaction rises as IT teams battle manual work

Recast has published survey findings showing that IT teams continue to struggle with application management and hybrid endpoint environments in Microsoft Intune and Configuration Manager. The survey gathered responses from 890 IT professionals worldwide.

The research found that many teams are broadly satisfied with Intune, even as they spend substantial time on manual operational work. Some 81% of respondents said they were somewhat or very satisfied with Intune, while 83% were somewhat or very confident troubleshooting issues within the platform.

That confidence has not reduced the administrative burden. The survey found that 65% of respondents spend between six and 15 hours each week on manual tasks such as packaging, patching, troubleshooting and reporting.

Most respondents described their work as either evenly split between proactive and reactive tasks or mostly reactive. The findings suggest that routine support and maintenance still dominate day-to-day endpoint management for many IT teams.

Application strain

Application packaging and deployment emerged as the most commonly cited challenge in Intune, identified by 37% of respondents. Third-party patching followed at 33%, pointing to persistent friction in keeping software current across organisations.

Manual work also remains common. Nearly half of the organisations surveyed, 49%, still package Win32 applications manually, suggesting automation has yet to replace older processes for a large share of IT departments.

The findings also highlight the continued importance of Configuration Manager, often known as ConfigMgr, alongside Intune. Rather than moving fully to a single cloud-based management approach, many organisations appear to be maintaining mixed environments that require staff to work across both systems.

Hybrid reality

Hybrid endpoint management was the dominant model for 62% of respondents. Fully Intune-based environments accounted for 15%, leaving a clear majority still reliant on some level of coexistence with ConfigMgr.

Among respondents using ConfigMgr alone or in a hybrid setup, more than half said they either had no plans to retire the platform or no timeline for doing so. This suggests a slower transition than some software industry narratives imply, with many organisations treating hybrid management as an enduring operating model rather than a temporary step.

The survey covered IT professionals across North America, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia-Pacific. It examined migration progress, endpoint management practices, application management, automation maturity, operational challenges and future priorities.

The results suggest that platform approval and operational strain can coexist. Many IT departments appear to have developed familiarity with Intune while still facing cumbersome manual processes around software deployment and maintenance.

Those pressures matter because application lifecycle work is central to endpoint administration, particularly in larger or more distributed organisations. Packaging software, deploying updates and handling third-party patches can consume time that might otherwise be used for planning, standardisation or broader security work.

The survey also pointed to the practical difficulty of managing estates that span legacy and newer tools. Where companies continue to rely on ConfigMgr for a large share of workloads, staff may need to maintain expertise in two administrative environments while balancing migration plans with immediate support demands.

Overall, the findings present a picture of modern endpoint management that is less about a clean break from older systems and more about extended overlap between established and newer platforms. For many teams, that overlap appears to be adding to the workload rather than reducing it.

Will Teevan, Chief Executive Officer of Recast, commented on the findings.

"One of the most interesting things about these results is that satisfaction and struggle exist side by side. IT teams clearly see value in Intune and have built strong expertise around it. At the same time, they're spending a significant amount of time every week dealing with application packaging, patching and the realities of hybrid environments. The question facing many organisations isn't whether Intune works. It's how to reduce the operational burden so teams can spend more time moving forward and less time managing complexity," said Teevan.