Security Advantages of Thin Clients in a Wireless Environment

Thin clients operate as a hybrid instance of a mainframe terminal using the client/server model, where the client is running on a local operating system and all processing is done on the server. This approach makes thin clients a highly efficient and cost-effective approach to networking and sharing applications in a wireless environment. A thin client machine is a stripped down computer similar to a terminal. Thin clients access applications that are preloaded on the host servers. Thin client architectures result in a low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) because they are inexpensive and can be maintained, monitored, and programmed centrally. Thin clients also make it possible to deploy and administer software licenses through a central point. This solution makes it easy to deploy and manage the access of hundreds of devices in an 802.11 standard wireless environment. It meets the regulatory requirements and controls for medical (e.g., HIPAA) and financial (e.g., Sarbanes-Oxley) information.

Drivers and client utilities for particular wireless network cards must be deployed and managed as part of the embedded firmware image on the thin client. They lack the cost of hard drives, distributed requirements for the management of antivirus, antimalware, desktop firewalls, and spam control software. Also, they do not require client patching, upgrades, and software license compliance monitoring.

A thin client model provides minimal and efficient use of bandwidth in WLANs. Data, applications, and processing power is consolidating on servers, minimizing security risks of data loss resulting from equipment theft or hacking attacks against unsecured client computers. Peer-to-peer attacks will yield no useful information because no sensitive information is stored on the client. As with other wireless clients, authentication such as SSH2 can be used to authenticate. Subsequently, tunnel encrypted wireless traffic can be used after authentication between the client and server to gain access to the network. Citrix's thin client Secure ICA Security and Cisco's LEAP wireless security solutions are both viable WLAN security solutions used in conjunction with thin clients.