In my time as a security consultant and managed services provider, I’ve seen some questionable behavior and attitudes. Prime among them is the common belief in the business community that indemnity offered by cyber insurance and contracts replaces prudent actions taken for regulatory compliance and for data breach prevention. VARs or technology consultants dealing with high-risk clients in the healthcare and finance industries, among many others, will likely confront this same mindset.
Alvaka Networks is available for IT consulting and support services to our clients and prospective clients in California and elsewhere. Our consultants can be dispatched from Irvine, Long Beach, Orange, Tustin, Chatsworth, Pasadena, Lake Forest, Murrieta and many other cities. Kevin can be reached at 949 428-5000. We can help you create a migration plan and budget that is based upon our standard methodology, but customized to fit your needs. Whether you need Network Monitoring, Backup and disaster recovery systems, IT service and support, penetration tests and vulnerability assessments, Alvaka Networks is ready to serve you. We are staffed by live support personnel 24x7x365 in our Irvine network operations center.
Smoke testing is a term used to describe the testing process for servers after patches are applied. 
Estimating an average time for patching servers and PCs can be a bit tricky. It can vary from one month to the next, depending upon the number and complexity of the patches released by your software vendors. You must consider all versions of operating systems and have a complete inventory of all your application software to do this job correctly. Our experience has shown that manual patching of systems takes on average of about 1.5 hours each.
This is a basic cost calculator for you to compute your typical monthly cost for patching your servers, PCs, laptops, tablets and associated application software. It also forms the basis for you to begin calculating your Return on Investment for software patching, or for comparison with alternatives to the manual process of patching operating systems and application software—such as Patch Management as a Service, also known as Vulnerability Management as a Service.