As offices have shifted to working to their home offices, which remote access solution have you found to be beneficial?
What makes the solution you prefer to stand apart from the competition? E.g., did you try other vendors and what made you prefer your solution more?
I spend a large percentage of my time remoting.
My personal suggestion is to have a good look at ConnectWise Contol. I still call it “Screen Connect”. I have been using it globally for a few years to remote into PC at conferences and client sites to configure meeting rooms PCs.
You can, if needed, set it up to run it as a service and be an administrator or NOT. You can see multimonitor, decrease bandwidth use by lowering resolution, use speakers and mic, group and administrate your remotes session on the server-side. Licensing costs are very reasonable.
I tried quite a few other remoting apps on the market and this one has not made me look for another.
My experience guys:
(a) For urgent remote trouble-shooting, use TeamViewer, can be set up rapidly but I would avoid it as I have not seen the accountability part ( record of whom has accessed so that when there is some malign act, you as the admin are not held responsible.
(b) For staff providing IT support on software / DB apps, you can use VPN + RDP, but please try to incorporate some two-factor authentication ( using login/password + SMS) as you also want security in addition to facilitating operations.
(b) For staff working on applications , e.g front desk or back-end staff, better go for some solution like Citrix or even VMWARE View, RDP by Microsoft is also relatively easy.
Finally , its good to give priority to ops and please the boss, but please make sure that you have an email to back you up that you have provided access to so and so. Normally, you wait for a request to allow an access but in case of urgency, you can always do the work and send an email later.
From a systems integrator perspective, I would say that there is not a right answer. Each use case is unique and each organization have specific goals to achieve with a remote work approach. It should be seen as an strategy that as a solution.
Do you just need to insert data on a web front-end? VPN will do the job.
You don't have web front-end and you need you users to access to a shared application, but your infrastructure resources are limited? A Remote Desktop Solution based on Windows Server will probably answer to that need.
Did you invested on physical workstations and want you users to get access from home? RDP solution based with citrix (for example) will do it.
You want to simplify your desktop management ? VDI (Citrix, VMware) may be the solution.
You have need for VDI for certain users, but also want to bring a BYOD approach with security layer? Workplace management solution (like Workspace One or Intune) may be the one.
For each one listed above, there are challenges. Firewall level, bandwidth, hardware infrastructure, licencing costs...
The IT should fit the company path, understanding where it stands and were it must go, from a (productive) remote work perspective. With this answer, you should decide the strategy.
There are several remote solutions. Personally I recommend either LogMeIn or TeamViewer. Both are free for personal use, but for a business, they need to buy a license. The cost depends on the number of users and they need to discuss directly with the sales department of LogMeIn or TeamViewer.
It is hard to say which one is better . I will say that TeamViewer has two major advantages :
-you can listen to the sound of the remote computer
-you can transfer files between the computers.
The simplest way of making work from home capability is delivering office physical desktops through Citrix. This is very much easier and will take only 3 hours to setup. This solution is more secure when you are using Netscaler as gateway. There will be no data transfer like vpn solutions. Office data will be safe and secure.
Citrix is the best option
For my clients, for the urgency and not to have a license cost, because normally it should not last too long, I adopted for VPN access with RDP access on the own machine in the office.