Remote access

If your company has its head office in Strasbourg and offices in Brest, and as your data cannot be stored in both cities at the same time, one of the two will necessarily need to access your data remotely.

For this setup, we offer the Gestan Cloud service. This service also includes technical support, software updates and automatic data backups.

However, there are at least three other methods for accessing your data remotely.

If your data is set up in client/server mode, you can access it directly from outside by setting up a WAN connection.

Please note that the response times for this solution depend heavily on the quality of your internet connection.

A VPN is a technique that allows two machines to be connected securely, usually via the Internet. It is often referred to as a secure ‘communication tunnel’. With a VPN, you can ‘see’ the file structure of the remote machine as if it were on your local machine.

In this configuration:

• the programme Gestan is installed on your local machine;
• the data is stored on the server accessible via VPN.

It is the local programme that initiates and executes the database queries. For example, when you request the list of invoices for financial year N for client X, Gestan retrieves all invoices for financial year N from the server, downloads them locally, then filters them locally and displays only the invoices for client X.

There are therefore two types of limitation: on the one hand, the upload speed of your desktop connection, and on the other, the download speed of your VPN client. If, whilst using the VPN, you are also downloading MP3s, streaming films and checking your emails, you are sharing the bandwidth and slowing down Gestan all the more.

This option involves installing Gestan on your server, then taking remote control of the server, logging in, and running Gestan. This is known as Terminal Remote Desktop Service or Remote Desktop.

In this configuration:

• the programme Gestan is installed on the server accessible via RDP;
• the data is stored on the server accessible via RDP.

In this case, all operations are carried out remotely: they are all executed on the server. Only the screen, mouse and keyboard are transmitted.

You must either dedicate a PC to this purpose or pay for the appropriate licences from Microsoft for Remote Desktop, plus implementation and support. Performance will be better than with a VPN, but the cost will be higher.

ℹ️ Other “Technical” articles