As a mobile workforce, we’ve come to expect instant access to our enterprise resources. In this video, you’ll learn about Remote Access Services and how it’s used to connect your users to your corporate network.
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It seems almost unnecessary to say that we are an increasingly mobile workforce, in fact, it’s probably more accurate to say that we are now a mobile workforce. How much more mobile can we possibly be? We can connect to any of our devices from anywhere we happen to be almost in the world. And because of that, we’re able to network and work from anywhere whether we’re on our home 802.11 wireless. We can be at a coffee shop. We can be at the grocery store. There are mobile hotspots everywhere.
And we also now have a new reliance on access to our applications. We need to access them from our mobile computers, from our mobile phones, from our tablet devices. Almost everything these days is also web-based which makes it even easier to connect to these applications and use them wherever we happen to be.
We don’t have to install any applications. We don’t have to have some client application on our desktop. We simply open our mobile phone, and we have access to everything that we need.
We used to be able to gain this access through dial-up lines. We would connect through a modem and a regular phone line and gain access to our corporate network so that we could use these applications. But these days our virtual private network technologies allow us to be anywhere and still allow a secure connection back to our corporate environments.
One way you get these secure connections back to our organization is through something called RAS or Remote Access Service. This is a windows service that’s been around for a very long time– back to the Windows NT days. And it was originally created so that we could dial into our networks using a modem and connect.
Obviously things have changed a lot since the Windows NT days. So Microsoft has also improved RAS. It’s now called the Routing and Remote Access Service or RRAS. That routing part at the beginning means that this remote access server can be a multi-protocol router running dynamic protocols such as RIP and OSPF. You have a demand-dial router inside of it so that you can connect to it with VPN connectivity.
You can, of course, still use dial-up connectivity if that’s what you need, and of course, has that remote access capability so that end users can connect to and authenticate through this centralized communication portal. This is one very important way that people are able to be anywhere in the world and still gain access to their very important applications.