Security and desktops

It's been twenty years since I was an information security manager, but I've never had any reason to question the judgment of the people in charge of security here. We are not told to shut down at night. In fact, we are told so often to leave our computers running in order to process an overnight software update, that we just get in the habit.

Password protection (and building security) keeps strangers from getting at the keyboard. Network security keeps the bad guys on the right side of the firewall.

We are supposed to log off so one of our co-workers can't sidle in before the machine hibernates, but many of us forget to do even that. Probably because we're really back-office and have no access to any sensitive data or systems.

If a machine has no power then no one can access it from any remote location right?

With that said who in there right mind wants to go into every office and tell each user one by one that you are going to have to update their computer and take them from their work during the day? Who is in charge of defragmentation, or backups, patches, software installation etc.

I'm sure that your network admins can't remotely boot from LAN either. Just in case, unplug it for them too!

I would say have them log off and leave it on. The server would be left on anyways so if someone wanted to and the network wasn't secure, they could still get into the network.

If you backup the computers, or run Windows Updates or antivirus updates it might make sense to do these things at night when they won't impact the performance of the computer, thus they would have to be powered on for these things to work.