David Berkus writes a very good weekly blog on “cutting edge business success tips.” The series of blogs is called Berkonomics and it is worth your time to go there and register to receive the weekly e-mails. Here is an example of his writing on the topic of “Switching Costs.” You can sign-up HERE. Dave’s series of blogs is also available in three Berkonomics books.
While I love reading Dave’s blogs and I am therefore sharing the information above, my main reason for writing this blog today is to share another piece of the endless wisdom that comes from Dave. This week his blog e-mail started with this paragraph:
First, let me PLEAD with you to take care with your email and strengthen your email password. A clever hacker invaded my GMail account, sent a phishing email to some on my list, harvested a few email passwords with his offer for a free document, and set rules in my GMail system to prevent me from seeing his work or even people’s responses. PLEASE improve the security of your password. And don’t use that email password for banking – or anything else. I will NEVER send you an attachment unless it has my BERKUS logo with my signature line, and never with these weekly emails. We have the hacker’s IP address, and are moving against that person or persons. But you don’t want to live through something like this experience. Now back to business…
I am always admonishing people to use strong passwords and to change passwords every 90 days. A strong password should have at minimum eight characters and contain upper case, lower case, numbers and special characters. Doing so does not guarantee that the password can’t be cracked, but you sure did make it hard to do so. Changing passwords periodically also thwarts hackers. Lastly, Dave very wisely points out that you should not use your banking password anywhere else and make sure it is a strong password.
Of course there are many other things needed to properly secure your systems, but falling victim to a cracked password does not need to be one of them if you follow these guidelines.
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.