Remote Access
Whether you want to set up a new member of staff to work from home, move all of your staff to a temporary “work from home” set up or plan and deploy a comprehensive remote working environment from scratch, we can help.
We have been a keen supporter of work from home style setups for a long time, way before the recent COVID-19 outbreak made this such a popular option.
Working from home does have many benefits from both the companies point of view as well as the employee’s point of view. Some of these benefits include:
- Staff can work on a very flexible basis when they don’t have to travel to and from work.
- Staff can continue to work in the event of disasters and national crisis.
- Companies can hire staff on a location independent basis, rather than being tied to sourcing staff from a local catchment area.
- Companies are not dependent on or tied to, a single location.
COVID-19: Working from Home During UK Lock-Down
In light of the recent COVID-19 outbreak and the resulting UK lock-down, many small businesses in Perth and throughout the UK have been forced to work from home.
We can help companies to set up work from home environments for all of their staff. We can work with companies to modify their existing setups in the least intrusive way possible, in order to allow their staff to work from home.
We can also set up new systems to make working from home possible where it has not previously been set up.
Remote Access via Teamviewer
This is the simplest solution that you can set up to allow your staff to work from home. Teamviewer has recently launched a more cost-effective version of their remote access software called “Teamviewer Remote” which is a lot more affordable than their full business edition.
Teamviewer Remote is just £10.90/month (Billed annually) per member of staff and allows access to 3 assigned computers.
With Teamviewer installed, your staff can then log in remotely to a computer located in the office, allowing them to access the file systems and any other software, from home, as if they were sitting in front of their desk.
Teamviewer remote access is ideal in the following cases:
- When each member of staff has a dedicated computer in the office that they can log in to remotely.
- When each member of staff also has a computer or laptop at home, that they can use to initiate the remote connection.
- Your company has systems that are located on-site (Which normally require users to be present in the office, before they can access) – this includes traditional file server and exchange email setups.
- Your company has bespoke software packages that run on-site and cannot be accessed via VPN (Including traditional setups of Sage 50 accounts and other client-server based software packages).
Remote Access via Anydesk
Anydesk is very similar software which also allows remote access so that your staff can log into their existing office computers from home. Anydesk comes with a slightly cheaper price tag when compared with Teamviewer although it does not have quite so many features and is generally not as robust.
Remote Access via VPN Connectivity
Remote access can also be set up using a VPN. This stands for Virtual Private Network. A VPN can be set up using hardware or software solutions and essentially creates a secure and encrypted “tunnel” between the remote location and your offices. Services can be accessed via this tunnel as if you were on the local network and all of the traffic that passes through the tunnel is fully encrypted.
A VPN has some advantages over Teamviewer remote access, including:
- VPNs allow staff to work from their own computer with access to any programs they may have installed locally, whilst also accessing company data via a shared drive.
- VPNs allow staff to access remote resources that are located in the office, but without having to occupy a computer on-site – so this is ideal when staff have taken their work computers home with them.
There are also some disadvantages of setting up a VPN:
- VPNs do not provide full access to all resources by default – the VPN just acts as a tunnel through which services have to be configured to operate.
- Not all programs are supported over a VPN – SQL driven applications, for example, are not supported over a VPN connection because the nature of a VPN link means data loss or corruption via SQL is common and creates too much of a risk.
Remote Access as Standard, via SAAS & Cloud Service Providers
Many modern businesses are already set up for remote access, by default. If you already have a small business cloud setup, or any other type of setup whereby you leverage cloud services such as Dropbox, Livedrive or Microsoft Sharepoint then you may not need to make any changes in order for your staff to work remotely.
Seeing as these setups rely on SAAS (Software as a service) providers, all of the data tends to be held independently of your office location, in the cloud.
This means that setting your staff up to work from home involves little more than having them log on to the relevant cloud platforms from their home computers.
The only complications here would be security. If staff are accessing these platforms from their home computers, as the business owner you have less control over these devices and furthermore, you don’t know whether these devices have any existing security issues.
We can help here by providing remote auditing and assessment of all home worker devices to ensure they meet security standards. We can also deploy cloud-based antivirus software to such devices to ensure that we can monitor and protect them from any emerging threats.
Finally, we can also set up remote access for all of your staffs home computers in order to provide ongoing support.
Remote Access via DAAS & Cloud Computing
If you have an Enterprise Cloud solution in place, or any other platform that leverages DAAS (Desktop as a service) then once again you will not have to make any changes to your setup in order to allow your staff to work remotely from home.
The big advantage of a DAAS solution in this type of scenario is that you have full control over the working environment.
DAAS effectively means that all staff members are logging in remotely to the system and using it as if they were sitting in the office. All of the work that your staff are doing will be accessed via and stored in, your corporate network environment and the platform in which they are working is a physically managed one.
The local computer used by each member of staff is only used as a means of access in this case, so the security on the local device is not as important seeing as no data is being downloaded, accessed or stored locally.
Need More Information About Working From Home?
If you need more information on how your staff can work from home, or how you can implement any of the above scenarios into your existing environment, get in touch with us using the contact details below.
We understand that every business is different and we can customize all of the solutions that we offer, according to each individual business that we work with.
Flexible Pricing
All of our services can be provided on an ad-hoc basis with a fixed hourly rate or an unlimited contract basis with a fixed monthly fee per device.
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