Smoke and Mirrors -- Thin Clients

So you think the computer that you're sitting at right now has everything it needs right there at your desk?  Think again because there may be something more behind the scenes.  Did you ever think that the computer that you're running may not be sitting at your desk at all? Or anywhere close to you for that matter?  If you're sitting at a university network computer... maybe at work.... or using a Chromebook, you may be using something called a thin client.

A thin client, also commonly referred to as a lean, zero or slim client is a computer or a computer program that depends mostly on another computer to do its processing.  This is opposite of the traditional fat client, which most of us think of when we think of a home computer.  A fat client has everything it needs, on board, to be fully functional.

Thin clients can be very secure in the fact that security need be focused more on the servers and not necessarily on each machine running on the network.  On the other side of this is the risk that these networks take by having this single point of failure.  If the server does get breached, essentially the entire network will go down.

There are also some arguments for thin clients’ cost savings.  Generally, the clients on a network can be fairly inexpensive as long as there is a good server running the network. This tends to be a total wash though, due to the cost savings being offset by the high cost of the server.

In my personal opinion, if the cost can be a wash, and you can centralize security and most of your maintenance efforts, I don't know why an organization wouldn't use the thin client infrastructure. Before you decide for yourself, here are three different ways that thin clients are used.  While reading, try to think of examples of each method.

The first is shared services.  Using shared terminal services software users on the network all share the same operating system and applications.  Users each get their own desktop, but are limited to running the pre-prescribed applications and doing simple tasks like creating folders or shortcuts.  The user has no power to change settings or download other applications to the server.

The second way that thin clients can be used is desktop virtualization.  Basically what this means is that each users’ desktop acts like its own separate machine on the network.  Each client sits in its very own partition on the server.  The big advantage to this is the higher level of freedom that is presented to users. Each user is given their own machine, but everything that it runs actually resides in the remote server.  Machines that are using desktop virtualization are thin clients that act as though they’re fat clients.

The first two ways that we’ve discussed thin clients being used are as processors of the user interface.  The third way however is browser based.  Browser based data processing is cool because you can run it from any fat client computer without using any of your own storage.  Yes, your machine is responsible for the data processing, but all storage is cloud based.  Sometimes the software that downloads is stored locally, but it is only there while you’re running your current session.  My personal favorite example of this method is the Google family of web based applications like Gmail™ and Google Drive™.  I am a prolific user of Google tools.

It’s exciting to think about where else the use of thin clients can go as we progressively move farther and farther into the use of cloud based computing. Hopefully you enjoyed this week’s blog and you start to think more about how thin clients are used in your school, place of employment and at home.