One of the reasons organizations are moving more workloads and applications to the cloud is to ease the pressure on overworked and understaffed IT teams. By leveraging hybrid and public cloud platforms, IT teams typically have less infrastructure to purchase, deploy and manage.
However, when employees are using traditional PCs and laptops in the cloud, IT admins still face the burden of patching, security, maintenance, version control and lifecycle management across a wide range of devices and locations. This can be a huge resource drain that detracts from using IT personnel for more strategic endeavors, such as digital transformation.
With more organizations using multiple clouds and supporting growing device diversity, the results can be unnecessary complexity, costs and risk. Management complexity is a particular challenge as multicloud environments become the norm: According to the 2019 State of the Cloud Report, 84% of enterprises have embraced a multicloud strategy.
Thin clients can effectively minimize these challenges and mitigate risk, which is why IT teams are increasingly embracing them as the optimal cloud access devices for many key applications and workloads.
The market for thin clients is continuing to grow at a steady pace as cloud usage increases. The thin client market is expected to exceed $1.32 billion by 2023, driven in large part by “easy and centralized manageability and increased infrastructure security,” according to MarketsandMarkets.
Leveraging thin clients as part of your cloud strategy can help maximize IT personnel resources and reduce operational overhead. Here’s a simple checklist of the various ways thin clients can empower IT teams, reduce complexity, improve user productivity, increase agility and propel your business forward.
- Leverage remote management software so administrators can remotely deploy, update, manage, troubleshoot, configure and secure thousands of devices remotely from a single console.
- Streamline application delivery by connecting to a centralized data hub that can run software maintenance, patches and upgrades for all devices. With thin clients, you can automate a wide range of time-consuming and costly manual processes that otherwise place a huge burden on IT administrators.
- Easily manage remotely stored inventories, reports and important documents rather than relying on individual devices. This helps to eliminate silos, making the business more productive and mitigating risks in both data protection and cybersecurity attacks.
- Increase productivity for IT teams as well as users by installing preconfigured systems in minutes and accessing cloud-based applications from virtually anywhere. Give users easy access to the apps, tools and data they need at any time without compromising performance, security or reliability.
- Lower operational costs through single-console management, which eliminates the need for IT admins to conduct site visits and allows IT to quickly and easily replace devices in the field if anything goes wrong.
- Simplify and reduce the costs of lifecycle management with devices that can be automatically patched and upgraded through software and don’t need to be replaced or repaired nearly as often as PCs and laptops that have many more parts that can break down or fail.
- Support a wide range of uses cases, including healthcare, call centers, business process outsourcing as well as end users working in environments that may require ruggedized features and high dependability because of environmental challenges such as extreme temperatures, dust, limited power resources and more.
Conclusion
Reducing complexity and increasing productivity are critical imperatives for just about every IT department. In fact, improving employee productivity is at the top of the list of digital transformation investments in 2020, based on TechTarget’s annual IT Priorities survey.
Thin clients can be a critical element in improving productivity and reducing complexity within IT departments and across a wide swath of users. The benefits can be particularly significant as cloud and hybrid cloud environments continue to proliferate.
To learn more about how thin clients can support your key digital transformation and other cloud initiatives, please take the time to review the articles and resources in this special section, Thin Clients 2020: Maximizing the Cloud Experience.
