Kevin is a featured writer for TechTarget. Here is is latest column:
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A few months ago, I wrote an article about the practice of non-attorneys consulting on HIPAA business associate agreements. After talking with scores of people about the article, I’ve concluded the issue of ethical and professional duty wasn’t discussed as it should have been. Readers, including IT professionals (who are or wish to be dealing with HIPAA-regulated entities), security and HIPAA consultants, and attorneys, etc., had some strong opinions about the article. They didn’t fully agree, of course, but they held common ground in their denial about their ethical and professional — and sometimes statutory — responsibilities.
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.