Extend the Life Of Your PCoIP Zero Clients

How is your company evolving in 2021? Even with the COVID-19 vaccine becoming available, we’re expecting to see working from home remain a popular option across many organizations for the foreseeable future, but it doesn’t have to be any less secure or more expensive than working on-site.

In the past, “remoting in” to your desktop computer from home was slow and unproductive. Today, many of today’s remote desktop systems, like Teradici PCoIP® solutions, have made accessing your company systems, files, and data easy and quick. We’re going to compare three main types of remote desktop clients and explain how to extend the life of your zero clients

What’s the difference: thin, thick, and zero clients

When accessing your remote desktops, you can choose between various types of devices, including thick, thin, or zero clients:

• Thick clients are traditional PCs or repurposed PCs. These clients are costly to replace and are more susceptible to security breaches because they retain copies of the desktop the users are accessing.
• Thin clients are computer terminals that are built for the sole purpose of remoting into a server, use a simple operating system, and have no hard drives. These systems are costly to maintain and replace.
• Zero clients: Similar to thin clients, but all computation work is done through a data center and only pixels are streamed to the desktop so it’s much more secure. It has no operating system and is the most secure of all three types of clients.

Aside from the security differences and physical size differences, you’ll see in the above chart that there is a significant cost difference between them as well.

The upfront cost of a zero client is low, and a subscription through Teradici to maintain the security and features of the client is only $2.50 per month. With 1000 zero clients, that’s $30,000 for a year, or $72,000 for 3 years with the multi-year discount. That’s 25% of the cost replace the zero clients with thin or thick clients!

Zero clients also have the longest projected lifespan (an average of over 7 years) and Teradici PCoIP Zero Clients remain the most secure end-user devices on the market.

Extend the life of your zero clients: low-cost firmware updates

The best thing you can do to maintain your zero clients is to ensure that you’re using the latest firmware:

• If you’re currently using version 5.5, your firmware is not secure and you should upgrade via Teradici subscription as soon as possible
• If you recently upgraded to version 17.05, you are missing some key features introduced in the last 3 – 4 years, including 4K resolution, support of new Wacom devices, AWS session type (no MFA, only connection via TAA), reboot notification, low light mode and more. New features that are coming in 2021 include remote management options for work from home use, additional webcam support, and FIPS validation.
• If you are already on a subscription, be sure to update quarterly or when a major firmware release is announced.