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Throughout my IT career, software updates have followed a predictable rhythm. Administrators have built their workflows around quarterly point releases or monthly Patch Tuesday cycles. Yet as AI tools become increasingly skilled at automatically identifying software vulnerabilities, threat actors are moving faster than ever. In that environment, I deeply miss the era of 18-month macOS/OS X release cycles.
We are quickly entering a period when software updates will resemble continuous cloud updates more than traditional operating-system releases. To adapt, IT teams must understand the three pillars of modern patch management.
Bradley Chambers has worked as an Apple IT administrator since 2009. Drawing on his experience deploying and managing firewalls, switches, an MDM system, enterprise-grade Wi-Fi, thousands of Macs, and thousands of iPads, Bradley will explain how Apple IT leaders equip devices for work, design supporting networks, train users, share stories from the front lines of IT management, and identify improvements Apple could make for IT departments.
Prong 1: Bringing End Users Up to Speed
The first pillar of this changing environment must place user experience and education at its center. Employees will need to accept a far more forceful approach to updates. For years, users have treated operating-system upgrades as optional interruptions they could postpone as long as possible. When zero-day vulnerabilities can be weaponized within hours, that attitude creates a major risk. We may be approaching a period in which such issues arise almost every month.
IT departments must ready their employees for frequent, mandatory disruptions. Similar to applications such as Zoom or web browsers that continually update in the background, operating systems will demand comparable update frequency. Workers need to understand that a brief reduction in immediate productivity is a necessary trade-off for protecting their organization from data breaches.
Prong 2: Compressing IT Deployment Windows
The second pillar places substantial operational pressure on IT deployment teams. In the past, an administrator might spend 90 days testing a major operating-system update against corporate applications before rolling it out to production devices. That schedule is now obsolete, and 90 days could shrink to 9 days—or even 9 hours.
Testing periods must contract from months to weeks, days, or hours depending on the seriousness of the discovered threat. IT teams will need to rely heavily on device-management tools to apply compliance policies immediately. If a critical patch is released, administrators may have to automatically lock any device that remains unpatched by the end of the week or day, compelling the update before the user can return to work.
Different employee groups may also require separate rules. Developers with privileged access could be held to tighter deadlines than workers without elevated permissions.
Prong 3: The Operating-System Architecture Burden
The final pillar rests squarely with operating-system vendors. Google had a major advantage when creating ChromeOS because it built a cloud-first platform capable of silent background updates and near-instant restarts from the ground up. I manage hundreds of Chromebooks, and it is remarkable how consistently they remain current. Apple and Microsoft, by contrast, are constrained by decades-old desktop architectures originally designed for installation from physical media.
Apple has made considerable progress through declarative device management and Rapid Security Responses, which allow smaller security fixes to be installed without lengthy downtime. Even so, a standard macOS point release can still require 20 minutes of installation. Apple must continue redesigning its update process so that restarts are seamless and, most importantly, application state is restored exactly when users log in, preserving their active workspace layouts. Apple is still far ahead of Microsoft. I have taken Macs that were behind on major releases, including Ventura, and brought them current with a round of updates and restarts. Some Windows 11 PCs I have used out of the box have required four or five update and reboot cycles, with some updates failing before additional firmware updates are applied.
Digitio’s take
The acceleration of security threats driven by AI means patch management can no longer be a secondary task handled on a fixed schedule. It must become a continuous, core discipline. Apple environments already have much of the required infrastructure through declarative device-management technology, but IT leaders must change their organizational approach to keep pace with modern threats. If updates are too slow or frustrating, employees will resist them, and in the AI era a delayed patch is an invitation to a breach. Apple still has work to do: more updates across macOS and iOS need to occur without requiring a reboot, and changing how its update system works will not be easy.
Apple @ Work is exclusively brought to you by Mosyle, the only Apple Unified Platform. Mosyle is the only solution that combines all the tools needed to seamlessly and automatically deploy, manage, and protect Apple devices at work within a single professional-grade platform. More than 45,000 organizations trust Mosyle to make millions of Apple devices work-ready with minimal effort and at an affordable cost. Request your EXTENDED TRIAL today and discover why Mosyle provides everything needed to work with Apple.