Remote Desktop Vs. VPN

You're at home, but all your files for work are on your office PC. You could use Virtual Private Networking to connect to the office network, or you could use Remote Desktop on your office PC to work on the files, or even combine the two methods. This article will explain the differences of using Remote Desktop versus Virtual Private Networking for connecting to and working in a corporate or private network across the Internet.

Telework

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, a trend emerged among information workers and professionals called "telecommuting." As more people connected to the Internet, many found ways of doing office work away from their office PC. This came to be known as "telework."

VPN

Virtual Private Networking---VPN for short---is technology that makes a secure connection to a private network possible over unsecured public networks such as the Internet. What this means is that a PC can "pretend" it is directly wired to a private network. As a well-known standard, VPN has support in many programs, as well as native support in popular operating systems like Windows XP.

Remote Desktop

With the release of Windows XP, Microsoft introduced a revolutionary concept: connecting two PCs over a network, where the keyboard, mouse and monitor on one PC work as if they are directly connected to the remote PC or to a special server that hosts multiple "desktops" in this way. The Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is also possible over a VPN connection, but it is not required for a secure session, according to Microsoft.

VPN Limitations

With VPN, the traffic headed for the private network is "tunneled" through the Internet by encrypting it, where the private network decrypts the information on the other end. This makes the traffic significantly slower than a typical local area network (LAN) connection, which isn't encrypted at all. With consumer broadband being slower at uploading than downloading, this effect is only amplified. Another limitation is how the VPN "driver" sends all network traffic---Web, email and downloads, as well as file operations---through the VPN "tunnel," which can bog down the system even further.

Remote Desktop Limitations

In early versions of the Remote Desktop Protocol, only the monitor, keyboard and mouse functions were transmitted to the remote PC or server. At first, access to files and drives on the local PC was impossible or very difficult to arrange. Subsequent development of RDP has begun to include access to resources on the local PC, but with mixed--and often slow--results. On top of that, low bandwidth and network interference can make Remote Desktop practically unusable.

VPN Advantages

One clear advantage of VPN is how the "work" is handled by the local PC. Only the resources on the network rely on the VPN connection; all human interaction is handled by the local PC as a complete workstation. This can be critical for graphics-intensive applications such as graphics design, 3-D modeling and digital illustration. Troubleshooting VPN is generally easier, since any problem with the network can be isolated fairly easily.

Remote Desktop Advantages

With Remote Desktop, you use one PC as a "clone" of a remote PC desktop. This has the advantage of having all the drives and network resources of the remote PC right on the desktop. The Internet connection is simply relaying keystrokes, mouse coordinates and graphics data back and forth, where the remote PC is handling files, email and Web directly on the private network. Recent development with RDP has included support for including resources on the local PC, but with a few limitations.

References

• SearchEnterpriseDesktop: When to Use Remote Desktop vs. VPN
• Computer Techno: Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) Explained
• TechSoup: Introduction to Virtual Private Networking (VPN)