How Do I Stop Being a Hostage to IT and the Six Reasons We Feel Like a Hostage?
Over the years we have seen many new clients come to Alvaka Networks feeling like they are hostages to Information Technology. These people feel this way for many different reasons. Most often the person feeling this way is the CFO, Controller, CEO, COO, IT manager or an IT technician for the most part in that order in terms of frequency.
Why do they feel that way?
It is usually because their systems were:
1. Poorly designed
2. They don’t work right
3. The system is insecure
4. No one knows what the last guy...
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.