PCs drain on resources as organisations fail to power them down

Commenting on the findings, Bimal Parmar, vice president of Marketing at Faronics, said: "The impact of a sound desktop management strategy should not be underestimated, especially when considering that only 30 per cent of a desktop's energy is actually utilised productively. This not only wastes a significant amount of power, but also results in unnecessarily high costs."

The OnePoll survey of 1,000 employees across private and public sector organisations found the primary reason for PCs not being powered down was the assumption that desktops need to be kept on for routine security updates to take place. It revealed that 36 per cent of respondents believe powering down desktops will hinder the day-to-day activities of staff and disrupt necessary maintenance by IT personnel.

"What some people do not seem to realise is that solutions are becoming increasingly sophisticated. IT departments are now able to boot desktops for scheduled maintenance whenever desired and ensure that computers are not shut down while essential updates are occurring out of hours, thus having no effect on company productivity," Parmar said.

Further findings
The survey also found that, despite the cost savings associated with adopting green IT strategies and the introduction of green regulations, more than a third of those polled do not have green IT policies in place and more than half said the reason for this was because they believe it will take too much time and effort to develop, implement and enforce them.

Only 27 percent of them considered their organisations to be 'green’ in terms of IT efficiency.