Leave a light on
October 10th, 2007
More and more companies are employing software designed to take backups and install patches on employee desktop computers after they have left for the day. The employees are told to leave their computers on each night, although logging off is optional, as is leaving your monitor switched on, so the cleaner can gaze in awe at your ever-changing screensaver.
While this may seem like a great way to backup data and apply approved patches on mass, I can’t help wondering how much testing went into the development of these network based backup programs. What if my PC is running important software and I’ve left it on overnight so it can finish? I don’t want to find that it rebooted after a forced patch while I was not at my desk. And who dictates what gets backed up on an employees PC? Important document folders, emails, or just activity tracking logs?
Apart from making your company carbon footprint even bigger, from a security point of view, leaving all those computers on overnight connected to the company intranet increases the chances of your company network having a security weakness, or becoming infected with malware.
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