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Today marks the first day of National Cybersecurity Awareness Month.
I am pleased to see one of the themes for this year’s National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, is about doing security updates. Only by patching your software in a timely manner, can you be truly secure. Even if you do all the other things, skipping this critical step will leave you vulnerable.
The themes for 2019 are as follows:
• Own IT.
› Never Click and Tell: staying safe on social media
› Update Privacy Settings
› Keep Tabs on Your Apps: best practices for device applications
• Secure IT.
› Shake Up Your Passphrase Protocol: create strong, unique passphrases
› Double Your Login Protection: turn on multi-factor authentication
› Shop Safe Online
› Play Hard to Get With Strangers: how to spot and avoid phish
• Protect IT.
› If You Connect, You Must Protect: updating to the latest security software, web browser and operating systems
› Stay Protected While Connected: Wi-Fi safety
› If You Collect It, Protect It: keeping customer/consumer data and information safe
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.