While thin clients still represent a small portion of the number of endpoints deployed by IT organizations, Dell is betting that an increase in IT security breaches involving, for example, ransomware, is about to drive up interest.
To bolster thin client security even further, Dell today added a Threat Defense for Windows Embedded thin clients offering, while making Dell Data Protection | Endpoint Security Suite Enterprise software available on Dell thin clients.
Dan O’Farrell, senior director of product marketing, Dell Cloud Client-Computing, says that for those IT organizations that opt to run instances of the Windows Embedded operating system on Dell thin clients rather than the native operating system, Dell makes available the Threat Defense for Windows Embedded offerings to bring the same malware protection that Dell provides on other endpoints to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments.
Meanwhile, Dell Data Protection | Endpoint Security Suite Enterprise software makes use of machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence to determine whether a file should be allowed to even run in the first place.
O’Farrell notes that when thin clients are employed, the entire security posture of the organization changes. Instead of trying to remediate security issues after the fact, a thin-client approach enables IT organizations to centralize endpoint security management in a way that prevents a security breach from occurring in the first place.
The degree to which IT security concerns will push more organizations to embrace thin clients more aggressively remains to be seen. But one thing that is probable is that given those concerns, more IT organizations than ever are at least considering all their endpoint options.