Remote access for mobile workers

Nowadays, remote control is one of the main subjects in the field of IT. Especially when it comes down to reduce the costs spent on maintenance of computers or the support of customers and end-users, remote access has become a key solution in which most enterprises, but also individuals, are looking into.

In this paper, first you will be provided with a brief description of this technology, what the current standards are and what the future will bring.

Currently, there are a couple of products in the wild, both targeting home and business customers.

While this list is far from being complete, the major ones probably are VNC (and all of its devirates), PCAnywhere, Dameware and many more.
There are also built-in remote control tools in various operating systems, including Remote Desktop piece of software which Microsoft is shipping with their operating systems since they are developing software. The scope of these tools are, however, slightly different as they focus more on the system administration only, whereas the other products listed above are more focusing the home consumer or end user support field.

At it’s first, remote control was limited to be used in local area networks only. This has several reasons, from which some are technical, and some more historical. A few years ago, the traditional company was operating on a given scheme: The employees came into the office every morning, logged in to their computer, which might even have been a terminal based solution only, and worked. When it comes down to support that user or his device, the technician just walked his way to the end-users office or, at highest, did a remote control session on the local network. In this network, there was typically no firewall or address translation or any other factor which could prevent the technician from actually reach the associate’s computer on the network.

Those were the good old times. Things have evolved since then. That’s pretty much what happens to about everything in IT. Now, the companiesprovide their employees with laptops, so that they can travel and meet business partners, or stay at home and work while taking care of the children too.

I agree on the part where you will say that this is one of the rewards
s of human evolution, but it causes some issues too.

But luckily, these problems are technical, so you can deliver solutions. That’s what happened to remote access solutions .

The problems which came up with these mobile workers are the architecture of the internet. Because, although things evolve, the internet is still relying on a protocol which has never been designed to support all of these modern technologies. So, workarounds are currently applied: Firewalls are filtering and blocking traffic, routers are doing network address translation (called NAT) so that we actually do not run out of IP addresses. Having said that, you will find that conventional remote control solutions no longer work: They do not pass the firewall filters and once an address is translated by a NAT router, the remote session goes to the eden and will never take place.

But luckily, this problem has been acknowledge already a while ago, so there are reliable solutions available right now. Some of them, again this list does not claim to be complete, are Teamviewer and GoToMyPC.
Although they have some slightly different approaches, they are based on the same technique: Between the two parties usually involved in a remote access session, there is a third host which acts as an mediator. It will get information about the current network configuration of both hosts and, based on that, establish a connection no matter if there are a hundred of firewalls and NATs in between. One might think this solution to be another workaround which does not work half of the time, but a bunch of software products, where Teamviewer and GoToMyPC are included, have proven that this technique is working as expected.

So let’s see how things evolve in the future. I am sure the conditions of on-the-road connectivity will still change a lot, and I will be curious to see how developers and software producers are going to approach these problems. If you would like to understand more about the current standards and Teamviewer or GoToMyPC in special, I highly recommend you to visit it-space.net – my website offering %LINK1% for %LINK2% solutions.