Hans-Juergen Neumaier had finally had enough. Last November, the CIO of Sparkasse Haslach-Zell, a small savings bank in the
heart of Germany’s Black Forest, pulled the Windows NT desktops off employees’ desks and replaced them with Sun Ray thin clients.
“We were so tired and angry about the constant need to patch PCs and update our antivirus software,” Neumaier says. “With
all these huge virus and hacker attacks, ... we needed to do banking in a more secure way.”
Using smartcards, the bank’s consultants can log on to any workstation and access Microsoft Office and line-of-business applications
stored on Sparkasse’s Linux-based terminal server. The Sun Rays use an ICA (Independent Computing Architecture) client to
access the terminal. A Citrix Metaframe session captures commands and keystrokes from users, and sends back images from each
app as the screen changes. With no local storage or operating system, the ultrathin Sun Rays can’t be misconfigured or infected
with malware.
Alhough only one out of five Sparkasse employees currently uses a thin client, Neumaier’s ultimate goal is to move all of
them away from PCs and onto Sun Rays.
“I think we’ve learned our lesson,” Neumaier says. “We’re no longer able to handle PC administration.”
Since they first began to replace “dumb” terminals in the late ’90s, thin clients have always been niche machines in industries
like healthcare, banking, education, and city government. Some are “ultrathin” with no OS at all, which exchange data with
servers via an ICA or RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) client. Others are merely “thin,” sporting a firmware-based embedded OS
like Windows CE or XP and a browser. A few are even ordinary desktops, stripped of local storage that use custom boot software
or a terminal emulator. Although thin clients account for less than 1 percent of today’s desktop machines, they’re growing
twice as fast as PCs and may account for 10 percent of all enterprise systems by 2008, according to IDC.
The reason? Like Neumaier, IT managers have discovered that thin clients give them greater security with far less hassle.
“Security issues have gotten absurd when it comes to desktop PCs,” says IDC analyst Bob O’Donnell. “What thin client architecture
does is force you into really good IT practices. All you have to do is monitor the servers — you never have to worry about
the clients.”
Dumping the Desktop
For Keith Courier, moving to thin clients isn’t just a good idea, it’s the law.
His company, Mosaic, an Omaha nonprofit that manages care for the functionally disabled and housing for independent elders,
is switching from Microsoft Windows PCs to thin clients largely to comply with HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and
Accountability Act), which requires healthcare firms to prevent unauthorized access to electronic medical records.
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