Just an unofficial survey for myself.
Is RWW or RWA as important these days? Or do you use RDgateway/RDP with RDS cals to provide anywhere access to your SMB networks?
Or is it via VPN?
What’s the process that you make sure that your clients can remotely access their network at any time?
Or are they all in the cloud already and don’t need access to an on premises server?
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With our customers in the UK, it all depends on the solution presented to them after their (usually long overdue) 2003 sbs upgrades. Mostly its 2012 Essentials with email in the cloud, so remote access is not always required, and then usually it is VPN. We were forced into deploying SBS 2011 last week, and that will be so people can use RWW (hosted email was not a popular choice for that customer). Of those still on SBS 2008 or 2011, they tend to love the simplicity of RWW.
VPN + RDP. I use a Sophos UTM and the SSL VPN is very easy to use and manage. Once connected, they can then RDP to their desktop.
Still a lot of RWA/RWW usage at the SBS sites for desktop users. Laptop users use VPNs.
We use RWA every day. Any problems with it are reported by end-users within minutes – even in the middle of the night – so we rely on that to ensure availability.
9/10 just access e-mail most of the time, but virtually all users occasionally demand access to their desktops.
We have several users who use RWW/RWA frequently, and several more who use it less often. We require all key employees to have remote access and to test it at least monthly, in case of epidemic, blizzard, etc. We use AuthAnvil for extra security.
SBS 2011 – RWW is important to us for email and remote PC and server access.
Our SBS site uses RWA daily.
RWA all the way!
It’s just easier to set up and manage than a standard RD Gateway install.
I find customers like a platform with Hyper-V + Essentials 2012 R2 + a client VM’s for remote work in case their office machine is shut down or asleep. I always try to make sure WDS is part of the set up too, in case they need to have new VM’s deployed, which also works for physical machine deployment (and Essentials has that system recovery option that relies on it). This is what I would call a “private-cloud-in-a-box” solution for small biz. I don’t usually bother with application-level virtualization like RemoteApp on this scale, instead just going with easier-to-manage full desktop virtualization and remote connectivity (because having to manage the full RDS stack is far more complicated than just doing the already-setup RWA and simple Hyper-V VM deployment thing). I mean, you just use your WDS setup, deploy an image into a VM (which is just like installing it on any other computer), and use server/connect and RWA gives you your cloud-like VM access. I mean it’s just so dead easy to do. Plus, you even get DDNS and a subdomain if you don’t want to deal with certificate headaches and don’t have a static IP. And then dealing with your RD stack setup – don’t get me started there. RDS is built for multiple servers. Or at least large servers that have the VM capacity to run multiple instances. I want to do my remote access stuff in one machine and Essentials does that. I just add my VM’s, connect them, and I’m done. I haven’t been looking at differencing VHD’s until just recently, but that will really take a load off replicating VM’s too.