It’s hard to tell fact from fiction in technology advertisements, says technology and security consultant Kevin McDonald. These irresponsible claims about a product’s compliance or security capabilities can have ethical and legal consequences.
…I can’t tell you how many times I have heard things like, “Since my vendor said that it would make me compliant, I assumed that it would.” Unfortunately, “I assumed” is not a defense and, in some cases, might actually be turned against the purchasing consumer or the VAR that didn’t complete their due diligence. I recently had a conversation with a vendor sales person about compliance and asked what kind of training his sales team had received. The response was eye-opening to say the least. It went something like this: “Training for what? That is the legal department’s problem.” When I raised several concerns about the product claims he was making, he said, “Not my issue. I won’t be the one in court….”
Read the whole column HERE
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.