Organizations spend a lot of money on equipment, on personnel to manage the equipment and on infrastructure to insure that the tools to do a job are available and can be run by their employees error-free.

When a virus, worm, spyware, malware or plain rat modifies a computer's standard mechanics, a normal person is often at a loss as to how to fix it.

Wouldn't it be more prudent for the technical people to be engineering new defenses, optimizing the existing system or answering questions about how to use software tools, instead of repeatedly fixing a wreck of a computer because it was jimmied by a worm or the weekend geek?

This is what employers face.

In the Microsoft world, which is where most corporate environments spend their money, it can be an expensive proposition. The tools to defend a standard desktop can be pricey. It then becomes a vicious cycle, because the technical staff, instead of doing what it might be doing, is off trying to keep up with the plethora of tools that were brought in to prevent catastrophe. At this point, the solution becomes the problem.

What's a corporate director to do?

Well, there are many solutions and there are, of course, dozen of companies with products that claim to be THE solution, which, as everyone knows, is frequently not true. You then spend more time and money verifying what will and won't work. In short order, you may discover that your solution is actually a new set of problems, either because of the products themselves, or the impact they have on your infrastructure.

The key is to find a solution or menu of solutions that:

1. ) Are fairly easy to implement
2. ) Don't impact existing products
3. ) Are capable of "setting and forgetting"
4. ) And don't cost a tremendous amount of labor or money

Open source has been making inroads into the corporate environment and making a strong case for the legitimacy of operating systems like Linux in the business world. A lot of it has to do with cost. It's "free." But is it really? Don't you have to have different kinds of technical people to maintain Linux systems?

In the corporate environment, Linux shines in web servers, network attached storage (NAS) servers, firewalls and general ancillary services that have either been overlooked by Microsoft or the Microsoft solution has huge gaping security issues.

Some firms have gone so far as to replace Windows on the desktop with Linux desktops but found that wasn't the whole answer either. There's still that one program used by one group of users that only executes on Windows, etc., etc.

The beauty of Linux is its chameleon-like capabilities. It can look like a Windows file server or a Novell file server or any number of Windows services.

So how does Linux fit into the managed desktop environment and how can you get Windows apps running under Linux?

Well, that's why Thindesktop has worked to get managed desktops running in remote environments sort of like Windows Terminal Services but powered by Win4lin instead of Windows Terminal Server or Citrix. The desktops run completely behind their network defenses, are backed up daily and are maintained by a highly trained technical staff.

Unlike Citrix or Terminal Services, the Thindesktop system lets users run any version of any application in a completely compartmentalized manner. That means A can run QuickBooks 97, B can run Quickbooks 2000, C can... Well, you get the picture. All the software runs without conflict because each user is running his own operating system.

Small businesses typically spend $5,000 to $8,000 just to equip a small five-workstation office with a file server and operating system. Compound this number with the price of a consultant (or someone in the office who knows something about computers) to maintain it. Whether you get a consultant or use staff, your annual budget for this will run around $20,000, either because you paid a consultant upfront or because you paid one to come in and fix what the untrained person in the office messed up.

With an ASP (application service provider) solution you can control desktop computing costs and leverage managed services. That's what ThinDesktop offers. There's no need to buy new machines every year. Lower-power machines can be used because all of the processing is done on ThinDesktop servers. There are no more consultants getting rid of viruses. No more antivirus software to update on each computer. No more failures to backup data regularly. No more, no more.

It falls to you to command the problem, not let the solution command you.