In the last two years, the need to access anything from anywhere has gained added momentum. Now, this has put the concept of remote desktops right in the center of the stage. Remote desktop services facilitate the need to not be bound by geography or device to get the job done. With employees around the world accessing their work from remote locations, the significance of remote desktops has been steadily rising.
What Is a Remote Desktop?
With the onslaught of the global pandemic, technological acceleration gained momentum purely out of necessity. Overnight, organizations around the world faced the novel challenge of delivering work to where their employees were. There was no workaround for it. Business continuity management (BCM) took on a life of its own aftermath of the pandemic. It became evident that managing everyday activities well in addition to increasing income was essential for a successful firm.
Companies throughout the world are being forced to reconsider the way they handle extensive remote work. Due to changing employee expectations and attitudes. Any employee working from the farthest corner of the world must have unrestricted access to their work. Geography and device cannot be impediments in the process.
This is where remote desktops once again proved to be a very smart cloud-centered solution with no hidden costs and no stray hardware. A remote desktop is nothing more than a method of using any device, anywhere in the world. To view one’s individual user profiles from a centralized server via a secure network.
A breakdown of the multiple terms in this definition will explain the idea of a remote desktop.
A user profile is the specific configuration for a specific user, including the fundamental preference settings. By accessing your user profile via a remote desktop, you are effectively operating in a virtual environment. This is owned and managed by you.
The centralized server is where your remote desktop connection is hosted. Your user profile is a dedicated chunk in this centralized server where all your data is saved. In other words, this server performs the function of the CPU on an ordinary desktop.
The secure network part is quite important. It is essential that the network you use to access your user profile from a remote location is set up and secure; this is something that all firms most definitely make sure of. Data integrity is of the utmost importance while working with remote desktops.
A remote desktop does the following things:
How Does a Remote Desktop Work?
There are two major components for any remote desktop setup.
One is the data transmission protocol that enables all information to move from one computer to another. Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) from Microsoft is an example.
The second is the program, installed on both the host server and the endpoint device, that connects to the host computer via this protocol. Remote Desktop Connection, which leverages RDP, is an example.
Software and operating system are powered by the host device and shown on your device. When you connect with the host computer or server using the endpoint device. The host device processes the data once the keyboard and mouse inputs are recorded from the endpoint device and sent over the secure network. The output, once again, is transmitted through the secure network to be displayed on the endpoint device.
If you examine it closely, you will notice that the host device serves as the CPU and the system functions much like the outdated desktop computers.
The host device, which the client wants to access, must be turned on if it needs to be accessed. In today’s world, the host device is most definitely a server rather than a computer.
The Evolution of Remote Desktop
The shift to remote employment, which appeared so abrupt and quick in the wake of the pandemic, was actually years or even decades in the making. The widespread shift to working from home began in the US in 1973 when fuel prices increased due to the OPEC oil crisis, making the daily journey to the office an opulent experience for the average man, according to HBR article on the future of work from anywhere strategies. Forsaking physical offices for private homes, public libraries and the ever-famous coffee shops quickly followed.
Throughout the oil crisis, many organizations modified their work and personnel rules, but few had thought through its long-term viability. According to a Forbes study, just 40% of respondents claimed that their staff worked from home prior to the epidemic, a percentage that significantly altered when the pandemic waves subsided.
Business continuity, agility, and resilience have had to be redefined by enterprises given the knowledge we gathered over the past two turbulent years. These are no longer contingency plans in case of a major power outage or natural disaster, with businesses resuming shortly thereafter. It means ensuring business as usual no matter where, when, or how.
This is the contextualization of remote desktop solutions in today’s world.IT teams all over the world used this as their go-to tool at the start of the new millennium to access client devices that were situated elsewhere and provide support services, like bug fixes.
TeamViewer was almost always the chosen one. From this basic feature of enabling an employee to access a corporate server from a distant location anywhere in the world, we have come a long way.
Most firms were obliged to put the prevention of business disruptions ahead of other issues like data security in the confusion of suddenly adopting work from home policies when the epidemic struck. The show had to go on, in some way, even if it meant allowing employees to access their work from personal devices on unreliable networks. In the past two years, the frequency of ransomware, malware, and hacking attacks has skyrocketed, whether related. It was as if bad actors saw an opportunity in a global challenge, much to the dismay of global organizations.
While most organizations ensured business continuity, some of them did end up paying the price. Just a few of the well-known companies whose data breaches made headlines and terrified their customers are Zoom, Marriott, and Twitter.
Two years down the line, we have learned from our experiences. Along with it has come a laser-like concentration on making sure that remote and hybrid working strategies succeed by using a two-pronged approach: first-rate end user experience and flawless data security. Businesses have understood that by concentrating on these essential elements like client experience and happiness. This ultimately determines the success of any given enterprise.
This is the long route remote desktop solutions have taken in the last decade. They are now a must for any employee to access their work at any time or place, not only a support tool used by IT professionals. And that is a very long route.
Benefits Of Remote Desktop
Remote Desktop Services can facilitate business continuity and agility by shifting emphasis from IT infrastructure maintenance to the organization’s actual objectives. By shifting the emphasis from managing IT infrastructure to the real business objectives, remote desktop services can promote business continuity and agility. Remote desktop services might assist companies in finishing a little bit quicker when the resilience and agility that come with digital transformation have become essential criteria.
Increased Cost Savings
Deploying many devices among your workforce and maintaining them have long been adding unnecessarily to IT budgets. For startups, SMBs, and for large-scale enterprises, end user device management and maintenance are ongoing processes.
By allowing an organization to purchase end-user devices with the simplest basic configuration, remote desktop services result in significant IT savings. All employees will need to access their work are a stable internet connection and a device that has a browser.
Businesses don’t need to invest in additional storage solutions because they already have the most dependable one available in the cloud thanks to remote desktop services, which rely on cloud storage. This comes at a fraction of the usual IT costs.
Great Device Compatibility
Employee behavior has changed in the recent past because of two major reasons. First, the majority of workers are digital natives who desire a device-neutral work style, comprising millennials and the oldest members of Generation Z. Their focus is getting the job done; on what is not a question that carries much weightage. Two, the pandemic has had far-reaching implications on how and when we work. Work hours are no longer defined by local geographical time zones. This implies that using personal and private mobile devices, in addition to business ones, is how people access their work.
Added to this is the complexity of multiple configurations and models of these end-user devices. While there might be a certain group that uses MAC OS, there will be another that relies on Windows. The same applies to Android and iPhones.
Remote desktop services enable complete device compatibility. As all users need to do to access their work is connect their device—regardless of model or configuration—to the remote desktop and begin working, device compatibility is not a worry at all. The machine they use is moot.
Strong Data Security
Organizations frequently face the most terrifying fear of a data leak. It has been made worse by the pandemic’s mandate that they adopt a work from anywhere policy. This problem is more apparent now since personal devices are increasingly common and can access business data through insecure networks.
Cloud security safeguards any corporate data when using a remote desktop. Accessing company data from personal devices is no longer dangerous with a strong and secure network. Data integrity is also protected from device failure because all company data is kept on cloud servers.
Most remote desktop services offer multi-layered security, which makes your data less vulnerable to ransomware or malware attacks. When end-to-end data encryption is included, your company’s and customer’s data is as safe as being locked behind a sturdy, reliable lock.
Easy Data and App Management
Remote desktop services don’t rely on complex access and data management infrastructure. Employees only must input their log-in credentials, and they can easily access the corporate server.
It helps in process and progress tracking since managers have complete visibility to track their remote workers.
App and data management also becomes easier on any device located anywhere.
Exceptional End User Experience
One of the biggest changes to our processes recently may have been the emphasis on improving the remote working experience for employees or end users. Businesses now place a high value on this since satisfied customers produce higher-quality work, which raises profits.
Poor device performance, configuration problems, application upgrades, and other concerns are removed with remote desktop services. This allows the user to fully concentrate on their task.
The flexibility to access all their work from any location enhances the remarkable end user experience by guaranteeing workplace mobility and providing complete device and location freedom.
Common Problems of a Remote Desktop
Remote Desktop Services do come with their fair share of disadvantages. But most of these challenges are almost always solvable and most others are preventable.
Network Failure
In remote desktop sessions, the most frequent issue end users have is establishing a proper communication or network path. IT admins can circumvent this challenge through the process of elimination.
Starting with attempting to create a client session that has previously been linked to success is the first step. This helps the admins to figure out whether the problem is specific to a client or to the network.
If the challenge is with the network, IT admins can then narrow it down to find out the root cause.
Firewall Challenges
This is another common challenge with remote desktops.
By making sure the port your remote desktop service utilizes is open to any firewalls that may be in place between client machines and the corporate server, firewall issues can be avoided.
Its crucial to keep in mind that some public networks—such as the Wi-Fi networks found in hotels, airports, and coffee shops—are built specifically to restrict RDP traffic.
Some companies set their corporate firewall to prevent RDP traffic from leaving the network. It prevents workers from using company devices to access their personal devices while they are at work. This is for obvious reasons of security.
SSL Certificate Issues
It might sound too simple, but security certificates can also cause failure in remotely connecting with a corporate server. End user devices must trust the certificate authority that issued the certificate to successfully access files on a corporate server. If your organization purchases these security certificates from well-known authorities, this is not a problem. But when organizations generate these certificates in-house, the end user devices might not trust the authority and restrict access.
The solution is to use a reliable security certificate authority.
Another security certificate challenge occurs when the end user device cannot verify the certificate the host server uses. If the certificate has expired, this verification process is more than likely to break down.
DNS Challenges
Believe it or not, many remote desktop connectivity problems have DNS server issues at the root. Remote connections from end users will not be possible if the host IP address has been modified.
End users might not be able to connect remotely to the host server if they are using an external DNS server as well. IT admins can modify the end user’s IP address settings so that it uses the corporate organization’s DNS server rather than an external one.
Remote Working Trends
Remote work is no longer the temporary arrangement that many people expected it to be when the pandemic began. It’s here to stay for the foreseeable future, and companies must adapt by embracing remote-work trends that will keep their workers productive and happy — whether they are in the office part of the time or not at all.
With that need in mind, here’s a list of the top remote-work trends for 2022 that companies should consider as they prepare for a future in which significant numbers of employees work remotely on a permanent basis.
Optimizing the Remote Employee Experience
When remote work seemed like a temporary arrangement, most companies put relatively little thought into the employee experience, meaning how employees thought and felt about working from home.
They didn’t invest in collaboration technology that would help employees feel connected to the rest of the organization while working in isolation. Nor did most companies deploy tools that provide a frustration-free experience for connecting to IT resources from out of the office. At best, they gave their employees software like a Windows RDP client so they could log into their company workstations from home.
As hybrid and remote working have become very possible realities, companies have begun investing more heavily in activities like virtual coffee breaks. And it can help employees collaborate and engage with each other. They have also implemented more user-friendly technologies, such as cloud desktops, which make it easier for employees to access the applications and data they need to do their jobs, no matter where they are located.
Securing Remote IT Assets
New security challenges emerge when workers are connecting remotely. Networks become more difficult to secure because they need to support users and devices connecting from beyond the firewall. Data is at higher risk of being downloaded by employees to local devices that are not physically secure. Even phishing emails can be harder to detect.
Going forward, it will become critical to secure the infrastructure and software that employees use to work remotely. Centralizing desktop environments in the cloud is one way to do this. When workstations run virtually inside secure cloud environments, data and applications never have to leave the cloud. It significantly reduces exposure to potential attack.
Supporting Peripheral Devices
When employees work remotely temporarily, being able to connect their company-owned IT environments to devices like printers and scanners is not usually a top priority. They can wait until they’re back in the office to print documents. Or they can print a few on their personal equipment at home.
But when employees work remotely regularly, these ad hoc approaches don’t work. Workers need a seamless way to integrate devices in their at-home work environment with in-office servers, file shares and other resources their company owns.
It is possible to achieve this, but specialized solutions are needed. As companies prepare to support remote workers permanently, factoring in the need to integrate with peripheral devices will be a priority.
Maintaining IT Hardware
Keeping IT hardware up and running also becomes more challenging when remote work is permanent. Employees may be able to get by with laptops that need maintenance when they’re working from home temporarily. But when they rarely or never go into the office, providing support for physical hardware is much more difficult.
One way to cope with this challenge is to minimize the amount of physical hardware that companies need to maintain. Here again, cloud desktops can help by allowing organizations to provide employees with a complete desktop environment that they can access from anywhere using their own hardware. And because the only resource required to log into the cloud desktop is a Web browser, there is no special hardware or software that the company needs to deploy and maintain on employees’ personal devices to keep them productive.
Keeping Costs in Check
The cost of supplying remote workers with the equipment they need to work effectively from anywhere can rise quickly, especially if companies try to recreate the IT infrastructure of the office within each employee’s home. When they do that, employees sometimes require high-powered desktops or laptops, routers and perhaps even UPS units to keep their devices running.
A more straightforward — and affordable — method is to host desktop environments in the cloud. These environments can be set up to give employees the resource allocations they require and are resilient to power outages or router failures. When employees are given cloud desktops, they don’t need specialized or costly technology to access their workstations from any place or device.
Remote Desktop vs Virtual Desktop: The Difference
One of the biggest questions IT administrators face is whether to implement remote desktops or virtual desktops. Unfortunately, there is no clear answer other than it depends on the business requirements. But what is the difference between the two?
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) involves the creation and deployment of virtual machines running on hypervisors. VDI is much more complicated than remote desktop environments. On the surface, both RDS and VDI are desktop virtualization technologies. But there are a few significant underlying differences between them.
RDS makes guarantee that end users virtually log into the same server interface and experience, even if exact configurations can be changed.
Whereas in VDI, each end user has their own dedicated platform to work on. They have the permission to modify. Usually, the IT administrators change these permissions.
RDS works best in environments where several end users must have access to the same applications and services. It is also much easier to implement than VDI. While multiple users accessing and sharing applications and files drastically reduces IT expenditure, it does create application challenges.
On the other hand, VDI works well for businesses who need to give their end customers more customization, which raises the complexity levels.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is a remote desktop?
A: A remote desktop is the way for a person to access their unique user profiles from a centralized server through a secure network using any device located anywhere. Even while specific configurations can be changed, RDS ensures that end users log into the same server interface and virtually have the same user experience.
Q: How does a remote desktop work?
A: When you connect with the host computer or server using the endpoint device, the host device powers the software and the operating system and displays it on your device. The host device processes the data after receiving the keyboard and mouse inputs from the endpoint device and sending them across the secure network. Again, the output is transferred to the endpoint device for display across the secure network.
Q: How do I use a remote desktop connection?
A: Once you have the remote desktop application set up in your home computer, all you have to do is open a browser, type in the URL that leads you to the host server and hit Enter.
Q: What can you do with a remote desktop?
A: With a remote desktop, you can access your work from anywhere, anytime from the corporate host server.
Q: Is a remote desktop safe?
A: Using a remote desktop is much safer than storing your work on your personal device. Corporate data is stored on the host server. Thus, even if an end user device is lost or destroyed, sensitive data cannot be lost or damaged.