IT Blog

As the processes and techniques employed in industrial environments quickly grow, the upgraded accuracy and performance of devices will require to be controlled in fairly advanced ways. This requirement can be fitted with an emerging way of monitoring known as safe remote access.

Safe remote access uses a consolidated hardware and software system to make simple remote network access and diagnostics. At a glimpse, it looks a cloud-based safe remote access resolution would function in basically the likewise fashion a conventional Virtual Private Network (VPN) would. They both permit two IP-enabled resources to interact safely with each other remotely across the internet, just as if the resources were appended over the equal physical network. However, apart from this comparison, the benefits of safe remote access across traditional VPN connections instantly sum up.

 

VPN vs. remote desktop

VPN is used to securely link and access the resources on the different network. In contrast to Remote Desktop, a VPN enables you to access different network instead of a different system. Premium VPN services provide you encryption facility so that you can access the internet with full security.

When we compare VPN and Remote Desktop services, we notice that for security aspects, a VPN is usually reliable and better than Remote Desktops. Remote Desktops are commonly insecure because you never aware when a hacker or another body gets control of the system you’ve been using through Remote Desktop.

Moreover, Remote Desktops are difficult to apply in an environment where employees have their individual devices for work goals. You cannot change every machine into a Remote Desktop system, but you do wish that device to remain protected, and possibly access a Dedicated IP network which is usually given by VPN services.

A VPN, hence, is the foremost solution in this situation as it gives maximum encryption and also care about secrecy by rejecting all external entities from controlling or reaching your network.

Here’s the simplest method to know the difference:
– Employing a VPN is similarly placing a mask that conceals your identification by making you look like a different server in a different place when you access.

– More than simply a mask, an RDP enables you to become that different server or computer, using its apps and file sand desktop space as if you were lying right in front of it.

What is RDP?

An RDP functions by forming a virtual connection between you and a remote computer. By an RDP, the computer broadcasts its screen to you and enables you to regulate it. You can use the programs, files, and computing capability on the host system from a client machine that’s probably thousands of distances away.

The benefit of RDP over a VPN is that all of the strength of the remote host computer is at your end. If there’s specific software that you can just have on the host computer or if the host computer is more intelligent of performing computationally difficult tasks like detailed renders, then RDP could be a powerful tool.

Why choose a VPN?

VPN’s functions are completely different. Your device link to a VPN server, which can’t do much extra than connect users to the internet and execute many security measures. Once you do connect, all that the VPN server processes are your outbound and inbound online traffic.

The fundamental difference when comparing VPNs and RDP is that a VPN doesn’t allow your device with any extra functionality the way an RDP does. You’re still using the same aged device, only that its IP address has changed and it is now completely safer when using the Internet.

That security and privacy is a VPN’s biggest advantage. RDPs don’t have to give strong encryption to work, but a VPN without robust encryption isn’t full of a VPN.

While VPN is more broadly used today and satisfies the common requirements of interconnecting remote networks, it has many disadvantages when compared to a modern, reliable remote access approach:

1. Subnet Conflicts

 

VPN: Networks connected through standard VPN must not use similar local subnet. However, it’s not unusual that a computer manufacturer or systems integrator, who could be running hundreds of customer connections, will find one or more places using the corresponding subnet addresses. The result is the requirement to balance NAT rules in order to tackle the addressing methods.

Secure Remote Access: With strong remote access, all locations can use the corresponding subnet, and all devices can have an equal IP address.

2. Routing Challenges

VPN: Connecting two remote networks by conventional VPN through a basic VPN concentrator needs management and configuration of the newest forwarding routing rules. In addition, routing devices normally need to be capable to support Datagram Protocol (UDP)  and encapsulation network address translator traversal (NAT-T). Conventional VPNs are acceptable for one-to-one or many-to-one connections, but not one-to-many (one technician to multiple sites) or many-to-many (multiple technicians to multiple sites).

Secure Remote Access: Cloud-based systems for remote access simply manage thousands of technicians requiring access to thousands of locations, including administration of individual access rights.

3. Firewall Opening Challenges

VPN:  Traditional IPSec-based VPNs need specific ports to be open (unsafe), and consequently some firewall rules permitted to communicate through this configuration may be misused by attackers.

Secure Remote Access:  All relay VPN links are established inside out, and just standard Network ports are used. These encrypted links are eliminated at the central internet-based server. By these encrypted links, the linking between technicians and devices is dynamically installed.

4. Firewall Blocking Challenges

VPN: VPN routes everything (and not just the protocols you need) unless you make the attempt to build and manage a number of firewall protocols.

Secure Remote Access: Defined machine agents are automatically limited to only granting access to the ports or services specified for the agent type. They are just activated when connecting to the agent representing the end device.

5. Activity Logging

VPN:  The principle of traditional VPN is to connect two networks and have everything reachable between the two peers. It is possible to limit what traffic is enabled through the VPN (the function is called Traffic Selector), but that goes opposite the purpose of the VPN. When you have so much traffic moving through a VPN, it is impossible to log all activity.

Secure Remote Access:  Because traffic moving between secure remote access points has to be strictly defined, it is simple to log the activity in the process. When you are connecting to someone else’s network infrastructure, it is smart to have simple access to these activity records, which is an added advantage secure remote access can give.

6.  Concentrator Management

VPN: Common IPSec-based VPN resolutions need an IT-administered concentrator because they need networking experience. Also, individual concentrators need typically be established at each service provider to bypass very complicated deltoid routing and firewall setups.

Secure Remote Access: The concentrator in a cloud-based solution is a basic service where per service provider receives a private account. Here the administrator concerns account certificates and controls dynamically what material and which sites per service technician should be entitled to access. There is no networking or different IT skill set needed.

 

Do you need a VPN or RDP?

That rely on whether you’re a company or a particular user.
If you’re a business:

• Use an individual VPN to provide your employees with safe and private internet access when they work in public areas or travel overseas;
• Use an inside VPN to provide your employees access to a reliable central server that comprises files they require to do their tasks;
• Use an RDP if you require your employees to reach and use a central system from remote places. This can be the problem if the central system emphasizes software or technical abilities that cannot simply be replicated or allocated to your remote employees;

Use an RDP if you require IT, technicians, to reach remote employees’ computers for support and troubleshooting jobs.

If you’re a single user:

• Use a private VPN to reach the internet securely and confidentially;
• Use a private VPN to stream your preferred content while you visit or work overseas;
• Use a private VPN for additional features that make the Internet a protected area.
• Use a private VPN solution to avoid online monitoring and censorship;

There are some exercises for an RDP for private users. These would be extremely particular circumstances where the user needs access to a home computer or must permit a committed fellow or associate to access their individual computer. Unless you’re a business system admin with specific needs, you’ll reasonably be seeing for a VPN.

Conclusion

Although there are several remote access solutions in the market, most began as IT solutions and are now being shoehorned into industrial environments. Resolutions such as these are difficult for all managers and users and a very noise from the uniformity offered by a complex industrial secure remote access resolution.

Actual secure remote access resolutions are also complicated, but the complexity should be moved from the client to the system administrator. This approach, the experience is centralized among some employees rather than being needed across the whole organization.