Remote working is an essential part of today’s business environment. But how do you ensure that staff are provided secure access to all the resources they require? How do you ensure that your data stays safely within the confines of your system?
We can help build you a safe and secure remote working solution that will provide your staff access to your systems, be cost effective, secure and scalable. Utilising Microsoft's Remote Desktop Services (RDS) we can provide you with a simple, secure solution that will provide your staff with a solution that feels exactly the same as their office desktop, as well as exactly the same level of systems access. Coupling Microsoft's RDS solution with Amazon Web Services (AWS) Auto-Scaling groups also ensure that you only pay for the system resources you need, when you need them.
Traditionally with a Microsoft RDS server farm you provision resources to ensure the smooth running of your systems when they are at, or near, peak capacity. This means that you are either, depending on whether your solution is in the cloud or on-premises, paying for compute resource that is being severely underutilised (i.e. you have sufficient compute provisioned to cope with a peak of 100 connections during business hours, this means that for approximately 65% of the time you are paying for compute resources that are not being used.), or you possibly have a relatively substantial capital expense to purchase hardware with sufficient resources to handle the peak load. Either way you are paying for resources that are only utilised approximately 35% of the time.
By Combining Microsoft RDS with the power of AWS Auto Scaling you can deploy a solution where you only pay for resources when you actually use them, potentially reducing your costs significantly. AWS Auto Scaling can monitor your RDS farm and add, or remove, compute resources as required, meaning that you are only paying for resources when they are being used.
Solution Components
Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDS)
– Microsofts RDS solution provides your staff with anywhere access to a secure Windows 10 like desktop with full access to all of your corporate systems and data. Utilising this solution you can ensure that your corporate data remains within the confines of your systems and ensure that you are meeting your corporate data governance policies. Utilising RDS can also eliminate the need to implement potentially costly and vulnerable public access solutions for your corporate systems.
Microsoft RDS is comprised of the following components:
Remote Desktop Gateway
– The Remote Desktop Gateway provides secure, authenticated, access to your RDS environment from outside of your corporate network.
Remote Desktop Connection Broker
– The Remote Desktop Connection Broker manages user connections to your RDS environment, ensuring that they are connected to the correct session host servers and balancing the load on said servers.
Remote Desktop Licence Server
– The Remote Desktop Licence Server manages the distribution of the RDS Client Access Licences.
Remote Desktop Web Access Server
– The Remote Desktop Web Access Server provides users with a simple web page to launch their connections to their desktops. Along with the Remote Desktop Gateway, this is the only component that is accessible outside of your internal network.
Remote Desktop Session Host(s)
– The Remote Desktop Session Hosts are the servers where your users work is carried out. These appear to be Windows 10 desktops to users and contain all their line of business applications.
N.B. Additional Microsoft Licence costs may apply
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Auto Scaling
– AWS Auto scaling is a service that can monitor systems/applications and, based upon specified metrics such as CPU usage, memory usage, or custom metrics and adjust the amount of resources, either up or down, being used to ensure that system performance is never reduced.