Remote Access Solutions

If you need to work from home as if you were in the office, the primary means of doing so will be either through a Virtual Private Network or a Terminal Server licence.  North Sydney IT can provide either of these solutions for you and your business at a low cost and using the latest remote access technology.

Virtual Private Network (VPN)

A VPN supplies network connectivity over a possibly long physical distance. In this respect, a VPN is a form of Wide Area Network (WAN). VPNs enable file sharing, video conferencing and similar network services. Virtual private networks generally don't provide any new functionality that isn't already offered through alternative mechanisms, but a VPN implements those services more efficiently / cheaply in most cases. A key feature of a VPN is its ability to work over both private networks as well as public networks like the Internet. Using a method called tunneling, a VPN uses the same hardware infrastructure as existing Internet or intranet links. VPN technologies includes various security mechanisms to protect the virtual, private connections.
Specifically, a VPN supports at least three different modes of use:
- Internet remote access client connections
- LAN-to-LAN internetworking
- Controlled access within an intranet

North Sydney IT designs and implements Cisco Secure Remote Access solutions.  For more information on these services please see the Cisco Secure Remote Access solution (click to view .pdf)

Terminal Server

Terminal Services provides the ability to host multiple, simultaneous client sessions on a Server. Terminal Server is capable of directly hosting compatible multi-user client desktops running on a variety of Windows-based and non Windows-based hardware. Standard Windows-based applications do not need modification to run on the Terminal Server.

A terminal server session can run across the Internet or through a VPN connection. As all processing is performed on the Terminal Server (ie Editing Word Documents, Performing Database queries etc.) there is no need to download or upload large data requests as only screenshots, keyboard presses and mouse clicks are sent between the remote computer and the Terminal Server. This results in increased performance and is like the user is sitting in the office on the internal network.