Los Angeles, CA – Tonight I am reviewing our new DFARS Pre-Assessment Questionnaire that has just been updated for 2017. It is a very compact 30 questions in a four page document. It of course is not a full DFARS assessment, but it is step one of your process you must do before anything else on your DFARS compliance journey.
DFARS is the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement. It is a supplement to the FAR that provides DoD-specific acquisition regulations that DoD government acquisition officials – and those contractors doing business with DoD – must follow in the procurement process for goods and services.
If you are an aerospace company, Department of Defense contractor or another type of organization that falls under DFARS compliance please let me know. Through January 31st we are providing this assessment free. To get your free assessment write to info@alvaka.net.
DFARS pre-assessment questionnaire sample questions
Remember, your DFARS deadline is no later than 12/31/2017. Your deadline may be sooner for some of the contractors of Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Textron, General Dynamics and Boeing. Each of these company names are hot links to their specific requirements.
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.