6 common IT practices that should be eliminated
Here is a good mrc Cup of Joe Blog about time wasting tasks in IT. I was asked to submit a suggestion for the article. It is a quick read on six things you can do to stop wasting time [...]
Mr. Nichols has over 25 years of experience in the Information Security and Healthcare Technology industries. Mr. Nichols leads the Global Product Security program at Danaher Corporation, representing over 30 companies, including 4 medical device manufactures and 8 life sciences companies. Focusing on security by design for Danaher’s medical devices, diagnostics, life sciences, water quality, environmental and applied solutions product portfolios. Mr. Nichols is the chairman for the Danaher Global Product Security Council and serves on the steering committee for the Medical Device Innovation Consortium (MDIC). He is a certified healthcare information security and privacy practitioner (HCISPP) and a certified HIPAA privacy security expert (CHPSE).
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.