Is your Powerdown Policy still active whilst your staff work from home?
At Techrelate we have a Powerdown Policy, ensuring that at 7pm every evening; all non essential office equipment including the Wi-Fi and network switches power off gracefully. Whilst we work from home, we are encouraging staff and clients to turn their computers off at the end of each day. Getting into good habits such as logging out from all Cloud based systems, disconnecting from the VPN and saving all documentation centrally, is advisable on several levels.
Why do we do this?
- Security – if a machine is switched off it cannot be attacked.
- Power Saving – a switched off machine will use very little power – saving energy, money and the environment. By taking the additional step of switching off the power at the socket, you can reduce power usage to zero. Please remember to flick the switch the next day before creating a support ticket when your computer wont switch on 🙂
- Update – when you shut down and or start up your machine it will be in a position to check for available updates.
- Refresh – restarting your machine regularly helps software work as it should.
Carbon impact at the office
According to The Carbon Trust, switching off all non–essential equipment in an office for one night will save enough energy to run a small car for 100 miles. This includes photocopiers, printers, computers and lights. Do you know if the lights have been coming on in your office during lockdown? You may not have direct electricity costs passed on from your landlord but does that make it okay not to worry? The Carbon Trust research looks at energy consumption in the office; the two largest sectors are heating and ICT equipment. Our Powerdown policy along with our Electrical Vehicle and our Reduce, Reuse, Recycle policies are some of the small steps we are taking to improve our environmental impact – as well as ensure tighter security for our networks.
Our staff are reminded to Powerdown at the end of each day. Please get in touch via help@techrelate.co.uk if you’d like to talk about a similar initiative for your business.