Think Thin

摘要

Hans-juergen neumaier had finally had enough. Last November, the CIO of Sparkasse Haslach-Zell, a small savings bank in the heart of Germany's Black Forest, pulled the Windows NT desktops off employees' desks and replaced them with Sun Ray thin clients. "We were so tired and angry about the constant need to patch PCs and update our antivirus software," Neumaier says. "With all these huge virus and hacker attacks, ... we needed to do banking in a more secure way." Using smartcards, the bank's consultants can log on to any workstation and access Microsoft Office and line-of-business applications stored on Sparkasse's Linux-based terminal server. The Sun Rays use an ICA (Independent Computing Architecture) client to access the terminal. A Citrix Metaframe session captures commands and keystrokes from users, and sends back images from each app as the screen changes. With no local storage or operating system, the ultrathin Sun Rays can't be misconfigured or infected with malware.