Just recently, I read on this web page and also in this EEC blog entry (both published in July 2009) about Microsoft using Sun Ray thin clients in their Enterprise Engineering Center (EEC) in Redmond, WA, where Microsoft is reproducing customer environments and performing product validation. It is absolutely stunning how the specific advantages of our Sun Ray technology fit perfectly into this environment. A Microsoft white paper describes how it all works: In preparation of a customer visit, Microsoft engineers set up virtual machines to rebuild a certain customer setup. When the customer arrives, they just get the Sun Ray smart cards, log in at any Sun Ray client and get their specific (Windows) environment displayed.
As always with Sun Ray, users can take their smart card off one Sun Ray station at any time, plug it into any other one, and continue their work from the new seat, with their data, their desktop contents, and their applications unchanged – because all is stored and running on the remote server. No data of one customer is stored on any client (the client is not much more than a graphics card and a monitor), so no customer will be able to access data from any other customer. As the Microsoft white paper says, "Sun Ray thin clients are designed for secure operation from the ground up (which is one reason they are so widely deployed in government and military agencies)".
Besides that, the Sun Ray solution saves time for the preparation and also electrical energy (as no PC clients have to be configured or used). And because the Sun Ray clients are less complex than PCs, they are also more reliable.
For more information on the Sun Ray technology, please visit this web page. I suggest that you also watch the videos so you can see how it all works in real life.