Become a “Top 10” IT Leader
May 13, 2025 @ 11:30 am - 1:00 pm UTC
Do you consider yourself a top leader in the IT world, or do you hope to become one? Join a group of the best and brightest IT leaders in the Southern California area. This is your opportunity to be a part of a unique selection of career advancement-minded professionals with like-minded goals.
Our current group of IT professionals come from various industries—including healthcare, software development, manufacturing, accounting, and more—and their collection of experiences combine to create an excellent forum for dialogue. If you feel like you could both contribute and receive value to this group, and if professional development is very important to you, then this might be the key to your success.
Plus, being a member of this peer group will not only help you grow as an individual, but you will also become an even greater asset to your company!
Every 3rd Tuesday of the month, Alvaka hosts a monthly IT Manager peer group. This peer-to-peer learning is a great opportunity for IT managers to discuss current industry challenges and share their ideas and knowledge with their peers. This group is a very valuable process for innovation, addressing opportunities, challenges, and issues of all sizes and types.
Members can expect to gain invaluable support, guidance and advice. The power of a peer group like this enables IT leaders to work through their ideas and problems, in order to be more successful in their decisions.
Some additional benefits include:
- Confidentiality
- Honest and unfiltered feedback
- Accountability
- Diverse perspectives and fresh insights
- Collective reasoning
- Access to greater resources
- Learning from other’s experiences (successes and failures)
- Sounding board for strategies
The goal for this peer development roundtable is to cultivate a group of elite IT Leaders who address, and solve, the most challenging IT topics currently facing today’s IT world. If you are interested in being a part of this select group, register to join today.
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.