How MSIT Uses Terminal Services as a Scalable Remote Access Solution

Like many large organizations, Microsoft has a geographically dispersed work force. With more than 78,000 employees in 78 countries worldwide, Microsoft faces continual challenges with making corporate information easily available to workers from remote locations and with ensuring that important internal company information is as secure as possible.

Although the vast majority of Microsoft employees have individual personal computers available from which to access company resources, the following two situations frequently occur at Microsoft:

• Staff members need to access internal company resources from home or from a remote location.
• Staff members who are involved in meetings or presentations at remote locations require quick access to internal company resources.

These resources may include any of the following:

• Documents that are located on internal servers at Microsoft.
• Internal business programs that are available only from inside the corporate network.
• Personal workstations that contain important files or programs. For example, developers at Microsoft often need to connect to their individual workstations from remote locations to access programming tools or code.

To meet these requirements, Microsoft maintains a Windows® Terminal Services environment. This environment enables staff members to log on to the Microsoft corporate network and then access terminal servers that are running various internal business applications.

With the development of Windows Server® 2008, the Microsoft Information Technology (Microsoft IT) department wanted to test the new features and functionality of the Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services component to determine whether these features could meet the requirements of a large corporate environment.

Read the rest of the article at Microsoft Technet.