Virus Scans During Day

Our cyber security department implemented a policy to run anti-virus scans during the workday. So every Wednesday my PC's hard-drive becomes bottle-necked by scans and gets sluggish. Also, the process priority for scanning is set to "normal" rather than "low", which means it's competing with regular applications.

I suspect the reason they do this is that nightly Windows updates can interrupt anti-virus scanning such that they moved scanning to the day time, but I have not received confirmation of this reasoning.

Is this standard policy, or just incompetence on part of the security dudes? Couldn't a rule be set up to only scan during the day IF the nightly scan didn't complete?

  if (tuesdayNightScan.status <> "finished") {
    runWednesdayScan(time="daytime");
  }

That way a daily scan would only happen if Tuesday night had a Windows update that interrupted or prevented the scan, rather than every Wednesday. (Different people have different scan days.)

I don't know how standard the policy is, but for at least one company I worked for, the scan was done during the day to help insure that it actually got done. The computers were often turned off when developers weren't actively using them.

They have asked employees to leave them on, but the above logic would still work even if somebody did turn theirs off at night. Maybe my PC has a small disk cache or something, but other people with different brands appear to have speed issues also at times. It seems they just got used to it being slow and accept it as a fact of life. It's a big sluggish bureaucracy and most people don't really have to work that hard anyhow most of the time: the PC's now reflect that culture. I'm just in the wrong section where the fire-breathers are perhaps.