Anyone use Terminal Services with their company?

More and more we have people that need access from the outside in. Typically we haven't done this, but more and more my boss wants to have their employees access the files on the server. The best option for us is to terminal services to have people remote in. Just curious what other people are using out there.

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Comments

shauncarter1

Barracuda SSL VPN product along with TS in the background is hard to beat. Their products are reasonably priced too. If you only have a handful of folks you may be able to just use the native Windows Gateway for TS stuff. I would give the Barracuda appliance a hard look.

colemic

We use AnyConnect, and outside vendors are only given portal access (no true VPN), they can either RDP to what they have a legit reason to access, or SSH to management consoles.

Corporate users on a corp device are given full VPN, corp users on personal device get portal access (same as above.)

We still need to tweak it but it works pretty decent for us so far.

J_86

How many people would be connecting from the outside?

I see terminal services used all the time where I work (at an MSP). From some larger environments with only thin clients to offices with just a few users that do all of their work on a TS server. It can be handy, but sometimes a VPN solution might be better depending on what you are trying to accomplish.

rsutton

A large part of my companies business is hosting RDS servers/farms so naturally we use Microsoft RDS for remote access. The performance beats VPN any day however it's more of pain to implement.

Jackace

From my experience it really depends on the applications your users will use. If the application is very database intensive and makes a lot of calls to a database then terminal services is probably the best way to go because the latency of a VPN over the internet could really make the performance terrible. If all you need is access to file servers, SSH, etc then a VPN is a much easier solution.