In the current corporate organizational context of whatever sector, digital technologies now play an irreplaceable role; used to access and manage company information, they’re often essential at every level of company processes (whether administrative, logistical or production) to complete various operational phases.
It goes without saying that the management of corporate digital devices is becoming increasingly important in every organisation, both in operational terms, as the usability and efficiency of digital are fundamental to support corporate and production activities, and in terms of costs, as IT solutions and their management not only are significant in terms of capital or operating costs but are also an essential asset supporting all business-critical activities.
Efficiency, scalability and security in IT management are also fundamental ingredients to ensure business results. Moreover, even when choosing IT solutions very different paths can be followed that involve higher or lower energy consumption, and therefore costs: the use of new hardware or existing ones, different requirements in terms of human resources needed for management, and so on.
ThinOX is the Linux-based operating system developed by Praim and designed to optimize the IT management of corporate endpoints. Thanks to its agility and minimality, it has been designed to run on any type of hardware, in particular on Thin Client solutions (with lower consumption) or even, in its ThinOX4PC version, on refurbished hardware, extending the life of assets already available in the company and requiring lower capital investments.
More in detail, ThinOX and the Praim product suite offer complete automation possibilities, significantly reducing the IT resources necessary to scale in managing endpoint estate involving tens, hundreds or thousands of workstations, also thanks to their peculiar security properties. In particular, ThinOX is optimized to integrate with all cloud paradigm options (simple, multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud) and VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) technologies adopted in many business contexts to create uniform, efficient and secure digital environments, regardless of the location from which they are accessed (whether these are offered on-premise or in the cloud, from a device in the company or on the move). ThinOX allows to create, configure and manage both direct and web connections to the main cloud or VDI technologies, always including the most up-to-date versions. In more recent releases, for example, ThinOX integrates RDP, Citrix Workspace App (v. 2402), VMware Horizon View (v. 2312), Parallels RAS (v. 19.3.24619) and UDS (3.6.0).
Together with Praim ThinMan, ThinOX offers corporate IT departments a very powerful centralized and automated endpoint estate management solution, through a secure communication and configuration protocol. From ThinMan it’s possible to automate connection distribution, ThinOX updates management, configuration replication, distribution of security certificates, perform remote assistance, set up authentication methods integrated with the corporate directory, even multi-factor ones, and many other functionalities from administration centralized workstations. Simplified and efficient tools otherwise not possible in a PC environment, especially on non-uniform estates.
Among ThinOX’s most important properties, in terms of security, are:
Read-only (disk protection) without local data storage
ThinOX is a read-only system designed to operate in a client-server environment (such as with VDI or cloud services/applications). The entire system, including user-handled data, remains in the volatile memory (RAM) and disk protection (also known as Write Filter) prevents unwanted writing on the disk with obvious advantages both in terms of privacy and, above all, security, avoiding most of the risks due to cyberattacks (malware and ransomware) as well as unintentional harmful uses by the end user. This property also ensures the system to be in the same state of integrity and security upon each reboot as it was at first execution.
Minimal and modular design
ThinOX is a minimal operating system that contains only the essential elements for the device management and integration with the technological partners’ IT environments. This allows, on one hand, to further reduce vulnerability risks, by compressing the attack perimeter and verifying the consistency of each module, and on the other hand, to maximize update times and performances, which concern only the modules varied between versions. Ease of use, efficiency, automation in the update phases, as well as in any restores, guarantee low business costs and high security, maintaining a constantly secure infrastructure against the most recent threats.
State-of-the-art authentication and verification workflow
Integration of state-of-the-art technologies for system and its components execution (such as Secure Boot), communication via private and encrypted connections with the ThinMan management software, and corporate authentication (multi-factor, integrated with corporate AD or through standards such as FIDO2 and others), allows integrating secure workstations through secure modes and connections, also capable of preserving the company infrastructure from vulnerabilities due to human factors (as in the authentication phase).
In the latest versions of ThinOX (12.1.*) security has been further strengthened by operating on Secure Boot features and extending the use of private (corporate) security certificates for encrypting communications, including connections using the 802.1X network standard according to different available protocols (PEAP; TLS; TTLS).
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