Amazon's Thin Client – A Christmas Cracker!
ITS Recruitment | ITS Works
For 25 years ITS has supplied IT staff and technology solutions to over 100 law firms
Amazon are targeting the evolving thin client market with their recent release of the WorkSpaces Thin Client. You could be forgiven for thinking that Amazon have repurposed their Fire TV Cube – because that’s exactly what they have done. Amazon already have an entire division producing Cube hardware and leveraging all that resource is a no brainer. Combine their streaming media player expertise with a massive logistics base, and you have a relatively cheap device delivered to your doorstep in a matter of days.
Amazon’s decision to enter the thin client market comes as a direct result of feedback from corporate users of their virtual desktop AWS WorkSpaces environment. Businesses seeking to connect less expensive hardware to their virtual environments will welcome the low-price tag (around $195) and minimal maintenance of the AWS hardware over more expensive laptops,
So, what’s inside the box? The thin client has a new software stack running a Fire OS enterprise version, 2GB of LPDDR4 x RAM, 16GB storage and an Arm processor with 8 cores running at up to 2.2GHz
As you would expect from any thin client the Amazon device offloads a lot of its processing power into the (AWS) cloud. It doesn’t store data or allow downloads, and prevents access to removeable media; also, it can only run software approved by the business, a boon for any CISO. If the device is lost, stolen or never gets returned by an ex-employee, all company data stays in the cloud.
The thin clients also support on-device authentication and integration with Amazon’s virtual desktop services, providing additional security as well as reducing the latency and bandwidth consumption of the authentication process.
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When combined with an AWS USB hub, the thin client supports connections for peripherals like dual HDMI monitors, mouse, keyboard, camera, and headsets.
IT teams are able to manage devices remotely through a central management console providing a complete view of their inventory. This means they can monitor which devices are active, software versions, reset a device, or associate it with a new user profile, set schedules for software updates and patches and verify compliance Groups of devices can be configured with their own policies, permissions, and access controls.
Any organisation providing IT to remote or roving workers, or planning for Disaster Recovery, will realise the benefits of being able to provide a device that can be connected in minutes without assistance, fully configured and secured. Logistics can be made far simpler by shipping devices directly from Amazon to the end user, remote temporary locations, or crisis management centres.
It will be interesting to see how this Amazon solution works with Software as a Service applications like Office 365 or NetDocuments for example. These applications and others like them (which is the direction in Legal) are not consistently happy in a thin client world.