Report: Many Orgs Still Rely on Traditional OS Deployment Workflows

Recently, Recast surveyed IT professionals to attempt to understand where organizations stand with ConfigMgr, Intune, and OS Deployment.

With Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) retiring in January 2026, cloud-only isn’t enough for the industry, and SysAdmins are actively seeking tools to make their jobs easier.

Recast says replacement planning for MDT is crucial in 2026

IT professionals across education, government, healthcare, finance, MSPs, and more were surveyed for this report. 

Despite 99 percent saying OSD is important, 18 percent still rely on WDS or MDT for bare-metal OSD, highlighting the urgency of replacement planning.

The report noted that the share of organizations still relying on MDT needs to be replaced within the next 6 to 12 months.

Recast notes that organizations still running MDT, there are a few steps to take for replacement:

• Audit your bare-metal OSD dependency: Identify which workflows still rely on MDT or WDS and how often they’re used in production.
• Evaluate OSDCloud in a test environment: 50 percent of survey respondents reported already using it, indicating a strong community and a well-documented path to adoption.
• Map your Intune gaps: If you’re moving to cloud management, document which OSD scenarios Autopilot doesn’t cover, which are risk areas.

Modern management solutions don’t address all pain points

Further, IT teams are moving to modern management – 48 percent Intune-only and 40 percent hybrid – but key pain points persist.

These pain points include: maintenance overhead, driver management, speed, and cost. 

The report signals a common thread: SysAdmins want OSD to be less work, not more, especially as environments grow more complex.

Cloud-only environments create a common assumption that imaging and bare-metal deployment are legacy concerns, but the report paints a different picture.

A significant majority of respondents (99 percent) said bare-metal or disaster recovery OSD is important, and 81 percent of those respondents are calling it a high or critical priority. Recast says the use cases driving these numbers are practical and urgent:

• Ransomware recovery: A device that doesn’t just need a reset, but a full wipe and rebuild.
• Hardware upgrades: Reimage from a new disk – hardware failure or upgrade.
• Production imaging at scale: Deploying OS builds reliably across large fleets with custom images.

Recast OSDCloud supports cloud transition projects

Recast’s OSDCloud supports the transition from ConfigMgr to hybrid to cloud. It helps SysAdmins improve maintenance and driver management workloads, reducing time and cost.

The OSD suite of tools simplifies operating system deployment and helps administrators automate and customize their OS processes with ease. 

OSDCloud delivers the flexibility IT teams need as device provisioning complexity grows with Autopilot, SCCM, and the recently retired MDT.