You’re the Non-technical Boss with Responsibility for the Network…
How do you know your most important functions of your network are working? How do you manage technical people whose work you don’t fully understand? This week I have seven simple questions to ask and I provide you some tips on what answers you should expect.
Backup and Disaster Recovery is one of the most important functions in Information Technology management to assure the future viability of your firm. But backup and DR is a function you don’t really know is working until you really need it and that is not the time to find out it is not working as planned. My recommendation is that you bring this topic up in your next meeting with your IT team. Here are the questions I suggest you ask:
1. How is our backup system running? (Let your IT person talk. Be patient and don’t interrupt. Let them tell you all they can.)
2. Are we getting any error messages from the backups? (Error messages are not....

You want to enter in a fully burdened labor rate for this field. What that means is that you want to take the base hourly rate, plus 25-30% for employer payroll taxes, benefits, vacation/holiday time, etc.
Smoke testing is a type of software testing performed by Alvaka after a software patching sequence to ensure that the system is working correctly and to identify any misconfigurations or conflicts within the patched system.
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.
Smoke testing is a term used to describe the testing process for servers after patches are applied.