I have become a fan of Joe Stangarone’s mrc’s Cup of Joe Blog. This blog he writes about signs that point to the need of a new IT strategy. He has tapped me before to be a contributor to his column and he does so here again. He gets some great input from some other IT professionals as well. It is a short, but value packed read. Here are the six signs. You can go to the bottom for the link to the full blog.
1. Key IT constituencies are expressing dissatisfaction
2. Shadow IT is growing
3. Your IT strategy has diverged from the company strategy
4. Development projects are slow and frequently delayed
5. IT isn’t invited to strategy meetings
6. You spend most of your resources maintaining legacy IT
Link to the full story – 6 signs that you need a new IT strategy
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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.