How Automation Is Easing IT's Patching Pressure
TechRadar Pro, Wednesday, July 15th, 2026
Ivanti's Chris Goettl argues only automated, risk-based patching can survive the AI-driven "Patch Apocalypse".
The disclosure-to-exploit window has collapsed from weeks to hours, and out-of-cycle patches are now routine, a pattern the author calls the Patch Apocalypse.
Frontier AI models such as Anthropic's Project Glasswing are surfacing thousands of high-severity findings quickly, while attackers use similar tooling to reverse-engineer patches in as little as 72 hours.
The human toll is visible: 42% of UK IT professionals report high job stress and 76% say it harms their physical and mental health.
Traditional patching assumed predictable vendor schedules and manual test cycles that cannot match this volume and velocity.
The proposed model is continuous risk-based triage anchored on CISA KEV, automated test and deployment rings, and closed-loop verification producing compliance evidence.