Moving away from teamviewer - using hardware VPN gateway devices

VPN
1

Hi all,

We are a machine building company. Up till now, we’ve been using Teamviewer for remote access to our machines. These machines are installed all over the world, and they all have a Windows PC on board, so Teamviewer was an easy way for remote access/support.
However we want to move away from Teamviewer for 2 reasons:

- security : we don’t want to use Teamviewer anymore, as it introduces a security risk in the customers network.

- user friendliness: Teamviewer recently had a complete overhaul of it’s UI. Nobody likes it anymore.

So as a solution, we want to equip all our machines with a VPN gateway device (eg Ewon or IXON). That way, we can connect via VPN to our machine local network (much safer). Once that we are connected via VPN, we can use VNC to remotely control the machine PC.

I just started evaluating the different VNC implementations (TightVNC, ultraVNC,…). However they have not changed since I’ve used them about twenty years ago.

I am missing drag and drop support for file transfer and performance (fluent updates) is way worse than Teamviewer. I also checked out Windows Quick Assist, but this requires manual starting the connection at the customer side. We need an ‘always on’ server service so we can connect to the machine anytime.

Does anybody has some suggestions for remote access that works (like VNC) only in a LAN (so no Teamviewer, Anydesk, Splashtop,…)

Thx,
Thomas.

2

As far as I know, everyone who wants to do commercial remote access where they’re focusing one ease of use and performance is also supporting cloud / over the Internet connectivity. I guess you could try on prem ConnectWise Control, and not allow incoming traffic to the IP other than through the VPN.

EDIT: No wait, I’m an idiot. You could look into NoMachine - those are direct connect only, kind of performance focused, and I think do more of what you might want. We’re playing with that plus ZeroTier for the virtual network.