Securing Kiosk Environments: Using Deep Freeze to Lock Down Customer & Visitor Devices

You just had an amazing European vacation, seeing all the sights from Vienna to Vicenza, but you had such a good time that you didn’t want to leave. As a result, you really had to drag yourself to the airport, cutting it a little close. But since they have those handy kiosks, you should be able to check your bag and print your boarding pass in no time.

Except … the kiosks are down. And now there are just two overworked airline personnel trying to check in a line of 30 to 40 passengers. You’re in serious danger of missing your flight.

Imagine how stressful that scenario could be. Now imagine it from the point of view of the airline staff on duty, the airport management or even executives at the airline. They simply can’t afford to have their kiosks go down. Unfortunately, there’s a lot that can go wrong with a public kiosk. But with Deep Freeze, you don’t have to worry about that.

The Challenge of Maintaining a Consistent Kiosk Environment

Public kiosks can take many forms and serve many functions. It’s not only airports that use computer kiosk stations. Retail businesses, libraries and grocery stores use self-checkout kiosks. Hotels may use kiosks for guests coming and going and for those who want information. Hospitals may use kiosks to help sort and triage patients or to serve those who don’t speak a language in which the staff are fluent.

Should the kiosks in any of these environments become unusable, the consequences range from medium inconvenience to a full-blown catastrophe. The problem is, there’s no way to gate these computers as you might other business equipment. They must be available to the public, or they won’t be of much use to anyone.

The Threats to Public Kiosks

Unfortunately, people tend to, well, ruin things. Not everyone, of course. But when dozens or hundreds of people are using your computerized kiosks every day, something is almost bound to go wrong. Most often, this arises from an honest mistake. A user may change settings, move around desktop icons or even fundamentally alter how the system works.

You also must consider bad actors. There probably aren’t many people who deliberately want to damage or impair public kiosks, but all it takes is one. A hacker could disable them with a remote attack, or somebody could insert a USB key with malware or some other form of virus on it.

The IT Burden

Any of the above incidents can really drain IT resources. You don’t want a situation where IT personnel are spending hours trying to fix a kiosk because a guest somehow changed the language setting to Swahili. And even when there isn’t a major problem, resetting kiosks manually is time-consuming enough. But with a solution that protects kiosk environments while making IT more efficient, managing these computers becomes much easier.

How Deep Freeze Solves the Kiosk Problem

Deep Freeze by Faronics has many use cases, and one of them is for kiosk environments. Deep Freeze can make computers indestructible — and these kiosks are computers. The solution does this by eliminating, reversing and preventing undesirable system changes. The key tool here is Reboot To Restore technology.

Reboot To Restore

With Reboot To Restore, you can create a “Frozen” or baseline state of the workstation. You can put whatever information or applications you don’t want to change or be changed onto the Frozen drive. Anything on this drive restores to a pristine state upon reboot. No matter what changes have occurred, when you turn the computer off and on again, everything on the Frozen drive goes back to how you want it.

Benefits of Deep Freeze for Kiosk Environments

Some benefits of using Deep Freeze to protect and maintain public kiosks include:

• Immutability: The system always restores to its desired state, guaranteeing a pristine user experience.
• Zero-day protection: Malicious software and ransomware are removed upon restart, negating the threat.
• Reduced IT overhead: There’s no need for constant maintenance and manual cleanups, freeing up IT resources.
• Enhanced security: Users can’t render kiosks inoperable by installing unauthorized software or changing security settings, and they can’t access sensitive data on the Frozen drive.

Ready To Enhance Security and Minimize IT Stress?

Public-facing kiosks offer many customer service and cost-savings benefits. But this is only true if the kiosks work properly. By securing your kiosk environment with Deep Freeze, you’re protecting your investment in these stations. Please reach out to our experts today to learn more.