Thin clients have a proven track record of improving productivity and reducing total cost of ownership through reduced capital expenditures, longer product lifecycles, simplified maintenance, enhanced security and lower operational costs.
With many organizations transitioning key applications and business processes to the cloud, thin clients are proving to be particularly valuable across a variety of use cases. Here are three prime examples.
Healthcare
Healthcare has long been one of the primary use cases for thin clients. Thin clients provide simple mobility for practitioners and caregivers to move from station to station and patient to patient with minimal risk. Data privacy is protected through single-sign-on capabilities as well as HIPAA-compliant security protections.
In addition, thin clients make it easier to store and retrieve real-time data and analytics to improve patient outcomes. IT teams benefit from devices that require minimal updates, have low failure rates, enjoy longer lifecycles and can be managed and secured remotely and centrally.
Typical healthcare use cases for thin clients include patient rooms, nurse’s stations, offices and clinic rooms, reception and self-check-in kiosks, labs and clean rooms, and telemedicine. Just one example: Kindred Healthcare, the largest provider of post-acute care services in the U.S., uses thin clients for both its home health division and nursing and rehabilitation centers and for enhanced patient and family support, such as teleconferencing.
Business process outsourcing
As with healthcare and virtual desktop infrastructure, call centers have always been one of the most popular use cases for thin clients. They provide a secure platform and are durable and efficient for multiple users to use across multiple shifts. They also provide IT teams with all of the critical benefits required for security and simplified manageability, discussed elsewhere on this site.
While call centers remain ideal for business process outsourcing, as cloud environments proliferate, they are not the only viable and valuable use case. Because thin clients are durable and lack parts that can break or break down, they are ideal for more rugged environments such as factory floors and distribution centers.
With thin clients, cloud-based computing secures data, and the low-thermal, fanless desktop runs cool and resists intake in harsh environments. In addition, because of the advantages in security, manageability and ease of use, organizations are successfully leveraging thin clients for a range of other task-intensive outsourced operations, including customer service, human resources, data entry services and packaging and distribution.
Workplace modernization
The workplace is changing dramatically and, with current world conditions, the importance of remote work and security are more top of mind than ever before. Thin clients make it easy for IT teams and users to be productive and secure from any location.
With centralized management, IT can easily configure users wherever they are without leaving the office. This is critical in supporting remote and mobile users and onboarding new users, scaling up or down as necessary and providing cloud access with multilayered security.
In addition, because of advances in processor technology from AMD and other technical breakthroughs from HP, users don’t have to sacrifice their workplace experience and can take advantage of multimedia, streaming, video conferencing and other collaboration tools that are essential to workplace transformation and modernization.
Conclusion
The use cases highlighted here represent just a few areas in which thin clients can support business process improvements, security and innovation. The limitations are no longer in the technology itself but in exploring opportunities.
There are many successful examples not only in healthcare, business process outsourcing and workplace modernization, but also in vertical industries such as manufacturing, retail, education, financial services and more. And there are even more successful horizontal use cases in areas such as digital signage, kiosks and embedded computing.
Are you ready to learn more about how thin clients can help your organization? Please review the resources on this site and visit HP Inc. to find out about the latest advances in thin client technologies and use cases.
