Los Angeles, CA – 2017 is going to be highlighted as a banner year for some DoD related contractors, and a sad downturn for others. Why? DFARS 252.204-7012 is going to define new winners and losers in defense contracting. Within this Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement is NIST SP 800-171r1, a security requirement that affects the protection of controlled unclassified information (CUI). Our government is tired of seeing our expensive and secret developments painstakingly developed by our best and brightest in the DoD community falling into the hands of foreign entities. This new security supplement is designed to stop that from happening.
So what are we seeing? We are seeing a steady stream of sub-contractors coming to Alvaka Networks desperately seeking assistance in meeting the demands of this new regulation for fear they will lose contracts and revenues. Prime contractors Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Textron, General Dynamics and Boeing are sending out letters to subs and this in turn is causing a sudden panic and urgency that I have not seen in a long-time. Alvaka Networks has put together a team DFARS 252.204-7012. This team is led by our COO/CISO, Kevin McDonald, who many of you at Technolink know. If you need assistance or advice on how to be best prepared for these new requirements please give him a call at 949 428-5000 or e-mail him at kevin@alvaka.net.
Read Kevin’s SearchCompliance TechTarget story here – DFARS compliance targets ‘controlled unclassified information’
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.