You’re the Non-technical Boss with Responsibility for the Network…
How do you know your most important functions of your network are working? How do you manage technical people whose work you don’t fully understand? This week I have seven simple questions to ask and I provide you some tips on what answers you should expect.
Backup and Disaster Recovery is one of the most important functions in Information Technology management to assure the future viability of your firm. But backup and DR is a function you don’t really know is working until you really need it and that is not the time to find out it is not working as planned. My recommendation is that you bring this topic up in your next meeting with your IT team. Here are the questions I suggest you ask:
1. How is our backup system running? (Let your IT person talk. Be patient and don’t interrupt. Let them tell you all they can.)
2. Are we getting any error messages from the backups? (Error messages are not....
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.