For years, the security industry has faced significant challenges in addressing vulnerabilities as they grow in volume and complexity.
The latest data from CVE.org highlights a sharp rise in reported vulnerabilities year over year. In 2024, the number surged by 38% compared to 2023. The surge was so significant last year that it overwhelmed the National Vulnerability Database, causing a backlog in reporting. However, detecting vulnerabilities is only the first step in vulnerability management.
According to Adaptiva’s 2025 State of Patch Management Report, 51% of IT and Security Professionals now say patching is a bigger challenge than vulnerability detection. The issue isn’t that organizations can’t find vulnerabilities, it’s that they aren’t able to patch them quickly enough so that they eliminate all the security gaps.
The report’s findings underscore patching struggles, highlighting the burden of manual patching processes, approval bottlenecks, and resource constraints. It’s clear that while threat actors leverage AI to execute attacks quicker than ever, manual patching is a hindrance – and it’s time organizations rethink their strategies to fully automate the patching process.
The Patching Burden: A Crisis in the Making
According to the report, 98% of IT and security professionals say patching disrupts their other job responsibilities. In addition, 77% of organizations take at least a week to deploy patches, some even taking months. This research clearly shows that far too many enterprises remain stuck in manual, slow patching processes.
Why Traditional Patching Fails
Let’s take a closer look at the specific hindrances of traditional or manual-based approaches to patching.
- Manual Workloads Overwhelm IT and Security Teams: The traditional patching process requires IT and security teams to research, package, test, and deploy patches manually. This process is time-consuming and resource-intensive, ultimately pulling teams away from strategic projects. Throwing more personnel at the problem isn’t working – it’s just creating a cycle of constant firefighting.
- Stakeholder Approvals Cause Delays: The patch management process involves multiple stakeholders – security teams find vulnerabilities and push for patches, IT teams manage operational stability, security, and patch approvals that include multiple functions. The result? 58% of organizations report patching delays due to external approvals.
- IT and Security Teams Lack Unified Strategies in Traditional Approaches: Common attributes or organizational structures see teams prioritizing risks differently. While security teams leverage risk-based models, IT teams often focus on maintaining services. This is why prioritization misalignment causes delays unless a unified strategy is in place.
- Network and Resource Constraints Slow Deployment: Challenges in patch deployment arise even when patches are ready. In fact, 70% of IT and security professionals say network bandwidth constraints make patching more difficult. Traditional patching methods cannot distribute patches efficiently across global endpoints without disrupting business operations.
With all these factors adding up to extended deployment times, legacy patching methods leave organizations exposed to vulnerabilities, while autonomous patching helps enterprises minimize the attack surface by enabling the quick deployment of patches.
Patching Has Evolved from Partial Automation to Fully Autonomous
Many enterprises have attempted to speed up patching by adding autonomous features to specific capabilities, but proper security requires fully autonomous patching. Let’s break down the different patching approaches:
- Manual Patching: Requires IT and security teams to track, test, approve, and deploy patches.
- Siloed Automation: Automates certain tasks like vulnerability scanning and patch testing, but approvals and deployments still require manual effort.
- Autonomous Patching: Automates the entire process – detection, prioritization, approvals, deployments, and testing don’t require human intervention. Humans still have visibility and control to adjust if needed.
Another key finding from the State of Patch Management 2025 report is that patches deploy 50% faster and with fewer roadblocks in organizations that embrace autonomous patching.
A Quick Look at How Autonomous Patching Works
Adaptiva is pioneering the approach to autonomous patching by letting humans define the strategy and letting the software do the rest. With OneSite Patch, enterprises can:
- Eliminate approval bottlenecks through automated workflows.
- Deploy patches instantly across thousands of endpoints without network disruption.
- Reduce mean time to remediation (MTTR) by automating prioritization and patching based on real-time risk intelligence.
- Ensure visibility and control with full transparency into patching status and compliance. It teams can instantly pause, cancel, or roll back any deployment to ensure endpoints stay safe.
Organizations see immediate benefits when they implement autonomous patching, including:
- Faster remediation times and reduced exposure to exploits.
- Improved collaboration between IT and security teams along with unified strategies and priorities.
- Reduced IT workload and fewer operational disruptions.
The new frontier of patching is here and ready to take your organization to the next level of autonomous patch management.
Dive in deeper with our webinar where we discuss the challenges of patching with Patrick Foley, Director of Technology Alliances at Tenable.
Watch the entire webinar here.
To learn more about how OneSite Patch can help your IT and Security teams save resources and automate patching workflows, book your demo here.
