A distributed ‘thin client’ system enables companies to let employees conduct their work on any end-point device by storing and managing all business information centrally, says business mobility company T-Systems South Africa chief technology officer Kim Andersen.

The core applications (apps) run securely in the data centre while only the app clients are presented on a secure business app portal and downloaded to the employee devices. Some apps may require data to be cached, but can be encrypted in transit and wiped when the session ends.

‘Thin clients’ also use security-enhanced chipsets, solid-state discs and flash memory and data can be committed to secure and protected areas or wiped when the session ends or the device is rebooted.

Even if a device is lost, the information is not retained on the device, improving business security while also ensuring that any employee can use another device to continue his or her work after completing a device validation process.

“The T-Systems ‘thin client’ system complies with European Union data-security laws and can also help companies to comply with Protection of Personal Information (Popi) Act regulations by preventing the leaking of personal information.”

The solution is aware of the user, device, application, data, location and connection type and policies can be defined and applied based on combinations of these, such as restricting access to certain apps or data.

This system does require the end-point devices to have connectivity. However, since little data are sent to the devices, with only visuals and some cache data sent to and stored in random access memory and only user input uploaded to the company, the device connection does not have to have large bandwidth.

“The system can take any app and ‘wrap’ it – virtualise and encapsulate it from the underlying operating system on which it is executed – to enable it to run on any device with a browser connection. This means companies can also change from having end-point computing, such as desktop computers, to having only screens that workers use.

This enables controlled equipment-replacement cycles and sweating of existing assets, better software licence management enabling fewer licences to meet business demands and a more easily managed corporate information technology ecosystem.”

Further, the system also enables companies to retain the use of legacy systems, such as systems running on the Windows XP operating system, through the same app virtualisation process.

“The system virtualises the front end of the legacy system; the system is then ringfenced in the data centre and the network and access to the legacy system secured, explains Andersen.