Although in business for almost two decades, Prolinx Limited is a name unfamiliar to many members of the training and simulation community. At ITEC 2015 in Prague this week, however, the company is demonstrating a technology that – although not exactly new – they have taken to unprecedented heights of resolution and dynamism.
Taking distributed learning to the next level, Prolink is demonstrating its ‘dumb terminal’ capability – based on the proven Amulet Hotkey technology – which injects new levels of security and flexibility into desktop training solutions. The principal advantage, other than multiple layers of encryption that facilitate greatly enhanced security, is to enable users to ‘train where we want, when we want,’ to a greater degree than is possible using traditional local PC based approaches.
“By removing the necessity for local hardware, delivering from remote servers through the cloud to a zero client and reducing the overall infrastructure footprint, we can help the client take significant costs out of any remote training requirement,” says Baz Compton, the company’s Senior Business Architect. A zero client, or ‘dumb terminal’ provides all the connectivity and capability required with no moving parts and no vulnerable access points, thus reducing the need for air conditioning at the same time as enhancing data security.
Optimising capability through use of increasingly high end graphics and managing the complex process of security accreditation from a data perspective are among the advantages Prolink has brought to this technology andf which, according to the company, are causing the Ministry of Defence “to sit up and take notice” in relation to potential applications across a series of platforms in land, sea and air domains. As well as the obvious advantages in reduced capital and infrastructure support costs, an attractive aspect of what the Prolink solution makes possible is the ability to ‘pay as you go.’ Where existing legacy solutions might demand multiple servers and terminals in situ throughout the year, despite the fact that they may only be in use for two or three months during that period, the Prolink solution allows optimisation of redundant capacity by delivering data through the secure cloud. Applications might, indeed, be limited only by the user’s imagination. Which is a slightly scary thought…
Taking distributed learning to the next level, Prolink is demonstrating its ‘dumb terminal’ capability – based on the proven Amulet Hotkey technology – which injects new levels of security and flexibility into desktop training solutions. The principal advantage, other than multiple layers of encryption that facilitate greatly enhanced security, is to enable users to ‘train where we want, when we want,’ to a greater degree than is possible using traditional local PC based approaches.
“By removing the necessity for local hardware, delivering from remote servers through the cloud to a zero client and reducing the overall infrastructure footprint, we can help the client take significant costs out of any remote training requirement,” says Baz Compton, the company’s Senior Business Architect. A zero client, or ‘dumb terminal’ provides all the connectivity and capability required with no moving parts and no vulnerable access points, thus reducing the need for air conditioning at the same time as enhancing data security.
Optimising capability through use of increasingly high end graphics and managing the complex process of security accreditation from a data perspective are among the advantages Prolink has brought to this technology andf which, according to the company, are causing the Ministry of Defence “to sit up and take notice” in relation to potential applications across a series of platforms in land, sea and air domains. As well as the obvious advantages in reduced capital and infrastructure support costs, an attractive aspect of what the Prolink solution makes possible is the ability to ‘pay as you go.’ Where existing legacy solutions might demand multiple servers and terminals in situ throughout the year, despite the fact that they may only be in use for two or three months during that period, the Prolink solution allows optimisation of redundant capacity by delivering data through the secure cloud. Applications might, indeed, be limited only by the user’s imagination. Which is a slightly scary thought…
Tim Mahon