A recent article in the Los Angeles Times says, “A new analysis of government records, published Tuesday in the journal JAMA, found that close to a thousand large data breaches affected 29 million medical records between 2010 and 2013.
Nearly 60% were the result of theft, reported study coauthors Dr. Vincent Liu, of the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research in Oakland, and Dr. Mark A. Musen and Timothy Chou, of Stanford University.”
This article validates Alvaka Networks and Noloki research that shows 53% of data breaches are a result of unencrypted lost or stolen PCs, laptops and tablets. Another large bulk of breaches are from poorly patched servers and applications. Our patching service and managed disk encryption service can provide enhanced security and safe harbor in the event of a breach, but most importantly, if you are doing both these things you probably won’t have a breach. If you are not actively doing patch management and disk encryption you need come up with a program ASAP or engage a firm like Alvaka Networks to assist you with that responsibility.
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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.