Future Posts
Follow Kevin's future blogging at www.noloki.com
CryptoLocker Critical Security Alert
Critical Security Alert Please be advised that Alvaka Networks is notifying it's clients and partners of a particularly malicious and destructive form of malware or “Ransomware” referred to as CryptoLocker. Whereas the vast majority of malware is written [...]
Are You Hip To HIPAA 3.0 HITECH And The Omnibus Rule?
The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) released a new rule on Jan. 17 to protect patient privacy and secure health information established under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and run by The [...]
Defense Technology Sought in Non-Traditional Markets (National Defense NDIA)
Software that was developed for the U.S. Army to create a battlefield network could be repurposed to protect the nation’s electrical grid. Domestic law-enforcement agencies need communications.
Honest VARs and MSPs face problems with cloud storage services
If you’ve been in the IT industry for awhile, you’ve no doubt noticed that it goes through one hype cycle after another. Many of us witnessed the dot-com explosion, implosion and subsequent MSP market conversion. Watching the cloud hype cycle of the past few years is a little disturbing -- not because I lack excitement about the massive possibilities of distributed computing, utility billing, virtualization advancements and economies of scale; they are large parts of my company’s business model. What bothers me is the extent to which companies will go to make a claim about the cloud. The exaggerations and omissions -- stemming from either ignorance, lack of risk aversion or outright dishonesty -- being used to sell cloud computing and cloud storage services are just nauseating. As an officer of a company competing in this environment, it’s especially hard for me to ignore these problems with cloud storage.
How to Protect Your Company’s Data
As a computer systems network manager and member of the nonprofit High Tech Crime Consortium, Kevin McDonald has seen all manner of data disasters: the medical company whose patient treatment records were lost in a warehouse fire; the police department whose website host vanished overnight; even the careless employee whose leaky liter of Coke ruined a computer server. “If you are a small business and you have a catastrophic loss of data, more likely than not you will never recover,” says McDonald, executive vice president at Alvaka Networks in Irvine, Calif. “Data storage is so cheap now, if you can’t afford it you should shut your business down and do something else.”
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.