World Backup Day: Safeguard Enterprise Data with Effective Backup Strategies
In honor of World Backup Day on March 31st, we encourage your organization to review and strengthen your data backup strategies. Ensuring that your data is securely backed up and reliably recoverable is crucial to your organization's continuity and [...]
Protect Against Ransomware With Immutable Backups
One of the most effective ways to protect against ransomware attacks is to have immutable backups. Immutable backups are backups that cannot be altered or deleted, even by users with administrative privileges. This means that if your system is [...]
Microsoft Monitoring Over 100 Ransomware Threat Actors
Microsoft recently disclosed that they are monitoring over 100 different threat actors utilizing 50 unique ransomware families to attack businesses and organizations across the world. These attacks have been increasing in frequency, severity, and sophistication. The threat actors behind [...]
Why Your Cybersecurity Strategy Must Include Multi-Factor Authentication
The cybersecurity industry is buried in unexplained and confusing terms and acronyms. Two important terms that everyone should know and understand are multi-factor authentication (MFA) and two-factor authentication (2FA). They are both security mechanisms designed to accurately identify a [...]
The Social & Psychological Impacts of Ransomware
When a ransomware gang attacks, it’s not just a problem for IT professionals, it impacts everyone. A ransomware attack triggers a chain reaction. Not only is it damaging to the entity, but it can also impact its employees, third-party [...]
“Pig-Butchering” Crypto Investment Scam
In recent news, the FBI sent out alerts of a new cryptocurrency investment scam that’s sweeping America, the “pig-butchering” scam. Originating from China, criminals behind this cryptocurrency scheme have expanded their operations to Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, and Malaysia. Researchers discovered [...]
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.
