♦ VIRTUAL PRIVATE NETWORK ( VPN ) - EDMONTON, ALBERTA, CANADA
♦ TERMINAL SERVER / TERMINAL SERVICES - EDMONTON, ALBERTA, CANADA
♦ REMOTE DESKTOP - EDMONTON, ALBERTA, CANADA

For small and medium sized businesses in Edmonton, throughout Alberta and across Canada, to remain competitive, an increased emphasis on connectivity has emerged.

A head office in Edmonton, sales office in Calgary, production facilities in Red Deer, salesmen with smartphones travelling across Alberta, all with a need to share information and maintain connectivity to company servers.

There are two technologies Viva Media employs to allow businesses to breach distance gaps and allow workstations and devices to operate seamlessly on a unified network delivered via the Internet.

►Virtual Private Network ( VPN ) - Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

A virtual private network amalgamates separate networks, allows data to flow between them and is encrypted to protect that data from the public internet.  There are many ways a VPN can be set up.  Hardware devices can be employed to deliver Site to Site connectivity.  This means that workstations at one location can access server files at another location without any physical connection attempt being necessary by the users, i.e. the networks are up and running at all times that the hardware devices are turned on.  There are also software type VPN systems where a user must start some software to make a connection to the main network.  The type of VPN to deploy is dependant on needs and budgets.

Viva Media can provide a connectivity assessment to help you determine what type of VPN setup will work best for you, within your budget requirements.

►Terminal Services / Terminal Server / Remote Desktop - Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

While a Virtual Private Network is great for securely moving files from one point to another, it is limited in speed to the bandwidth provided by the user's Internet Service Provider.  So while this is great for basic files such as Word Documents, Excel Spreadsheets and JPEG images, it is not so great for large files.  Additionally, companies may have need to run applications hosted on their servers that are accessible at a distance.  This is the primary purpose of Microsoft Terminal Services.  Terminal services creates "Virtual desktops" for remote users who can perform computer related tasks as if they are at the same location that the server resides.

For example, let's say you have a head office in Vancouver, and a satellite office in Kelowna.  You have an employee that needs to have access to your accounting software that is installed at the Vancouver head office. You could in theory install your accounting software on the workstation in Kelowna and use a VPN to access the accounting software's datafile, however these datafiles are often too large to move across the Internet safely (without risking corruption), so using a Terminal Server Virtual Desktop (aka Remote Desktop) the Kelowna user can log in, and use the Accounting software installed on the server, with the only data being transferred is that of the images projected by the virtual desktop which can be a lot less data than downloading the accounting file.