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Thin is in again for the new year

09.01.2006
The use of thin clients, once thought to be in decline, is having a revival. IDC estimates that thin-client sales grew 46 percent from 2004 to 2005. Thin-client computing will be the way of the future: Companies of all sizes are replacing their fat clients. Thin clients -- computers that are connected to a server in a network and have no hard disk drives -- have come a long way over the past few years, and the current lot can match the features of a fat client, but without the management and security issues associated with them. They are also a prime force in enabling people to telecommute, giving employes much-needed flexibility and mobility. And finally, the proper use of thin clients allows IT professionals to have greater control over their organizations' computer security endeavors.

Of course, IT staffers confront more than security issues. Their responsibilities extend to dealing with staffing shortages and the financial constraints introduced by upper management. That's where server-based thin-client computing struts its technologically advanced stuff: It provides features that can match those of fat-client computing (including data security and privacy), without the need for as many support employees and at a competitive price.

Thin-client architectures make it much harder for users to inadvertently infect systems with malware and make it easier to identify and remediate security threats when they arise. From a business continuity standpoint, if a single terminal fails, data won't be lost, since it's stored on the server. Having a centralized storage system allows for faster and easier backups as well as efficient disaster recovery.

Given the advantages of a thin-client architecture, it's interesting to consider the reluctance of some organizations to adopt thin clients. For the most part, the reasons for the foot-dragging lie in human nature. Some employees are hesitant to abandon their PCs, believing that in so doing they're giving up some control or independence. Others assume that thin-client product features are inferior, and some believe a switch to thin clients could negatively affect their ability to do their jobs.

Understanding the underlying thin-client mechanisms will help IT staffers educate other employees. When computer use was first becoming mainstream in the 1960s, the system configurations of the time used a structure much like the thin-client computing structure of today, in which the host computer -- larger and hence more expensive -- acted as a display and received input data.

In this scenario, employees using thin-client-connected displays are not truly using "computational" applications -- they're primarily using just a word processing program, although the keyboard and mouse make the experience feel no different than the experience of using a PC. The truth is that while today's operating systems require more processing power, storage and RAM, the applications that they run show little speed increase when run under a faster processor, so PCs don't really have a performance advantage over thin clients.