Cut Your IT costs with thin and zero clients
With technology evolving at an ever-increasing pace, even the traditional laptop setup has been revolutionised. As the world transitions to a working from home model, thin and even zero clients could be the solution your business needs.
What are thin and zero clients?
Thin clients are very stripped back laptops. They have the basic setup, on a cheap and cheerful PC. They have just enough ram and other specs to have someone boot up a laptop. Now where a thin client really comes into its own, is when it connects to a performance-focused server farm. The user on their laptop will connect to the server, and all the grunt work is done on a server. Spread this across your whole company, and you’ll have cheap laptops, and a powerhouse of a server providing the incredible performance you wouldn’t get on an ordinary PC.
Zero clients are essentially the same thing as thin clients, only they are even further stripped back. These PCs don’t even have an OS or local storage. Everything is done remotely. All storage, processing and power is performed on the server, meaning cheap rollouts to your business and performance-driven efficiency in resource.
What are the benefits of thin clients?
Decreased business cost
We’ve touched upon the decreased cost already – because these PCs are very stripped back. So things like the countless graphics cards your business would normally have would be reduced to just a couple of beefy ones that are for long-term in the server farm. But also, there are other cost-saving benefits. For one, whenever a laptop gets lost, stolen, or damaged, no longer are you shelling out £500+ for a replacement. Instead, you are replacing such thin or zero clients, with other thin or zero clients.
Increased security
With everything being dictated by the server, you have full control over how policies are enforced; for instance, if someone can only access a certain shared drive only from a specific location. You also get full audit logs, of who has accessed which files, who made amends and which programs are most in demand. When your business has a server, your business has control of files. You get to control what can and cannot be shared. You can say for instance, that nothing gets to leave the server. So, all work is saved to the server and nothing to the thin/zero client. This is especially critical for company-confidential files for instance. There no longer is the risk of a laptop being stolen, and all your company going down with it.
To entertain the idea of what it would be like if an employee had their laptop stolen; in a standard business, all their files are at risk. A malicious actor with enough intent can get into the laptop and then has free will on what they could do with the files; sell them to the dark web, upload them to a pirate site, or infiltrate your companies’ systems. With thin and zero clients, however, if someone were to get the PC, they’d have nothing to steal from the hard drive. Even if the malicious actor had the users password, as everything is managed centrally through the server, you can easily change the password at a moments notice. And with things like two-factor authentication, there’d be no way for the actor to obtain access to a server farm.
Flexible allocation of resource
With the central management of the server farm, you can dictate how the server is allocated resources. For instance, a user who only is going to be using a web browser will need fewer resources than someone who is doing CAD. In a typical setup where each individual has their own PC, staff are often not using their PC most efficiently.
In a thin client setup though, you have the beefy spec setup on the server. It can allocate the resource to the CAD user, and less resource to the person that is using the browser. The person using CAD gets a smoother experience as they have more performance to utilise. The person using the web browser, notices no difference, as they have always been under-utilising the performance capacity.
Expand this across your entire business, and you can see how quick the performance gains can be had. You can program the system to learn each user’s needs, for instance, what times of the day is most busy? During that time, more performance is made available. During what time is it quiet? During this time the server will perform updates and maintenance
24/7 access from any device
Being able to access your work files from any device is a godsend in a world that embraces home-working. You don’t need to worry about the inability to access, as server farms have redundancy built-in, in both networks, capacity and performance.
The thin client setup, a modern method of working, ensures that 24/7 access to work is always available. Which is perfect for companies that work across the globe.
One team in Europe can work on some CAD files and pass those over to Americans to continue the work. Then when they are done, pass the same collaborative files to Australians. Follow this methodology for a global enterprise, and you’ve just added nitrous to your employee productivity.
For more information on thin clients, zero clients and how Greenlight Computers can help you, get in touch! We are an expert team with years of experience behind us. We can tailor-make a solution that best fits your business need.