Some Good Q&A on Backup and Disaster Recovery
1. Where should small businesses start with disaster recovery, whether or not they already have a DR plan in place? What is the first question the small business owner needs to ask?
I recommend starting with determining RTO and RPO. If the small business owner starts here he or she will be off to a good start with the DR plan. What are RTO and RPO?
• RTO – Recovery Time Objective, the time between the disaster and when the system has been made operational again. Why is this important? Different businesses have different costs associated with...
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.