Monday, May 01, 2006

Get Done Stop Saying...Mobile Computing or Wireless Thin Computing

My challenges at many enterprises has been for many IT teams to revisit Wireless Thin Computing (-WTC) in conjunction with the lines of business (LOBs) teams who have smart Business IT people - this is an oddity! There has been more Mr. and Mrs. No's than anything else but business as usual. My reason for revisiting thin client was not only has the technology become more richly rewarding (TCO) and certainly the cost/performance blows rings around fat Windows or Linux clients, but a business policy decision to mitigate lawsuits from zealot lawyers and more fragmented consumer advocacy groups pertaining to personal and identifiable consumer data.

Logic has it that fat clients allow their fat and small peripheral friends (thumb drives, CDR's, portable drives) to carry data outside the confounds of the enterprise. Enough has been sensationalized in the media regarding Bank of America, Citibank, ChoicePoint, Dept of Justice, Dept of MV's (lots of these), blaming technology for the cause of "loss data" rather than a loss mind. Which brings me back to the point of thin client computing benefits. Thin client is a browser based LCD panel that gets its data feed from a server (old days mainframe to terminal). The data is never stored/access from a client device, but rather from a centrally managed server farm which removes the concern of data theft or clumsy employee handling of media. So no hands to touch the data, and the probability of loosing data further gets reduced. Now with the increase of bandwidth, many companies are springing into action by using disk-to-disl backup from remote locations only when the data size makes sense (Peta is still a Concern but storage technology and accompanying compression algorithm's will cometh). Hence, the additional savings from diminishing help desk support and application distribution (bye SMS) to start can really make the savings a true realistic ROI.

What does this mean to the public?