Are viruses giving you a world of PC hell?

It's a PC world, that's PC as in personal computer, not politically correct, although it is arguable that deploying PC is so ingrained in our minds that it has a certain political correctness about it. The issue of security is largely an issue of viruses. PCs have viruses like dogs have fleas. You want a solution that kills viruses dead?

Today's constant virus epidemics give you a world of PC hell. This combined with uncontrolled software upload means you cannot afford not to have a strategic desktop solution which removes the client-side virus issues. You also need this strategic solution to give you a whole host of business technology benefits. Netvoyager Thin Client strategy has many business benefits but virus and security issues are high on the features list and correspond to your corporate agenda.

Using Netvoyager thin clients with any server-based server solution (Citrix MetaFrame, Microsoft Terminal Services or Tarantella) brings you all the strategic benefits you've always wished for. Netvoyager Thin Clients have a disc-protection mechanism with a read only partition. There is no way for a virus to infect them, and no way for a user to make changes without security clearance. It is not a wide-open environment. Having said that, Netvoyager thin clients still provide all the application productivity facilities of a traditional PC.

Therefore, Netvoyager thin clients eliminate client-side viruses, which leaves the IT team to only concentrate on managing their virus exposure on their servers. This effectively reducing virus and security issues in their environment by more than 90%.

Computer viruses have cost companies in excess of £20bn last year in lost revenues and the subsequent cost of repairing infected systems. A study by research company Computer Economics says Code Red was one of the costliest viruses - accounting for £5bn. But Code Red is still minor compared to the costliest virus of all time - the Love Bug. The SirCam infected more than 2.3 million computers worldwide causing damage in excess of £2bn, according to the research.

Introducing virus protection software at every PC can help solve the virus problem but does not eradicate it completely. It also comes with its own problems, including the high cost of virus software implemented on each PC and the effort to ensure all PCs are updated with the latest version of the virus definition files and ensuring PCs scheduled scans are taking place.

The total cost of damage is calculated on the basis of loss in productivity and the clean-up process afterwards. The loss of productivity includes downtime suffered by users as well as company IT staff dealing with the virus during and after the attack. The clean-up process includes patching systems, and the time and money it takes for a company to return back to normal operations.

To demonstrate the concept, let us take a scenario of a company with 200 PCs. Let us assume that 200 PCs are infected with a virus, and that each of the PC users had a downtime of 2 hours and required IT support time of 2 hours. As this is a hypothetical and simple example, lets assume that IT support staff time costs the company £35/hour, and the PC user's time costs the company £45/hour. Therefore, each virus infected PC costs the company £160 excluding any consideration for the potential loss of revenue to the company. This is at least £32,000 wasted on one virus incident. Now this is assuming that a PC gets infected only once a year. This scenario does not even consider the other down time events such as software patch administration and physical PC failures. This simple example of just one incident costs the same as replacing all the PCs with Netvoyager thin clients.

In addition to the above, Netvoyager thin clients cost less than traditional PCs to purchase. They also provide further benefits of removing any effort required to update desktops with new operating system and application patches. These strategic improvements significantly reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) and increase return on investment (RoI) in their technology capital expenditure. As Netvoyager thin clients are very easy to deploy in any part of a company without the need for IT staff time, you can look at it as an appliance the provides applications-on-demand with full control over administration.