Know what you are backing up and know what you need to back-up.
They are not always the same thing.
During the course of writing this series of blogs on backup and disaster recovery I thought I would throw in an anecdotal story. I just got out of a meeting with my Director of Managed Services here in Irvine. We were talking about a long time client for whom we provide network management and security. We have provided IT consulting and IT services for this Orange County based manufacturer for more than ten years. In the course of our work we just uncovered a huge backup problem.
Due to a staff turnover we were asked to document their current backup procedures and what we found in the process was frightening. This client has over 100 servers, but only about 30% of them were getting backed-up. In the list of servers not getting backed-up are some critical servers that receive on average about 1,000 vital new documents per day. How disastrous it would be to lose one of those servers running their SQL database or Exchange Mail. The data lost and the time to recover would be devastating.
Even if you are not a large company with this many servers, do you really know what is getting backed-up? When did you last check? Are all your important accounting programs and files recoverable?
At Alvaka we strongly recommend a periodic meeting of your IT personnel to review the back-up jobs to make sure they are up to date with the current system environment. If you don’t have an IT team responsible for managing backups I suggest you request Alvaka to review your disaster recovery plan and back-up configuration on a periodic basis.
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.