Without taking the proper precautions, security solution providers can face civil lawsuits if customers fail to comply with the FACTA Red Flags Rules. Non-banking institutions, or creditors, must achieve Red Flags Rules compliance by November 1, 2009. Your customers may not even realize that these apply to them, so they will need much guidance to become and stay compliant.
In this edition of Patrolling the Channel, Kevin McDonald, Executive Vice President of Alvaka Networks, explains exactly what it takes to be compliant with the Red Flags Rules, and as well as what the penalty for non-compliance is. Find out how to help customers comply with the Red Flags Rules without putting your own business at risk.
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.