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Cloud infrastructure. The major benefits, besides cost and energy
consumption, that thin clients offer are ease of maintenance and security.
By definition Thinclients do not have any user‐specific settings or data and
are thus easily replaceable in case of failure; also there is no need to back up
Thinclients.
Tablets and smartphones
Besides the use of Cloud services on classical terminal devices such as PCs,
Notebooks and Thinclients, tablets, and smartphones have also established
themselves as access devices for Cloud services in recent years. Both device
categories offer sufficient display resolution and processing speed, and they
both have the required network technology on board. Bridge technologies
such as Microsoft Remote Desktop Services or Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop
also give these devices the ability to access legacy Windows applications.
The use of legacy Windows applications allows for the use of these devices
in the enterprise offering sufficient benefits in addition to e‐mail and
calendar.
Tablets were a massive driver for Private Cloud solutions in many
enterprises last year. Tablets offer a high standard of technology and the
early adopters have often been decision‐makers in the enterprise. This
explains why sufficient pressure was put on IT departments to make these
devices usable for the enterprise. E‐Mail, contacts and tasks are easy to
handle on these devices (not considering data security here for the
moment); but to leverage the entire potential of tablet computers to the
enterprise, it is necessary to modify the applications to reflect the features
and capabilities of the tablet. These kinds of modifications have not been
very widespread. The use of existing applications in the browser or by the
previously mentioned technologies Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) can
only be an interim step. Legacy applications are not optimised tablets and
do not take functions, such as movement sensors or geo‐positioning, into
account. If optimized for a tablet, a CRM system for an insurance company,
for example, could combine photos taken by the tablets camera with the
GPS position and could transfer this information back to the backend system
via a wireless network.
Use your own device, or bring your own?
Innovations in data‐processing often take place in the consumer
environment before they reach enterprises. The latest example in this field
is tablets and smartphones. Users want to access services and process data
on their new devices. This poses totally new questions in terms of data
security, access and support. But many businesses expect to gain benefits
