Remote access integration can be a great selling point for your product. However, integrating different solutions can cause more problems than it solves. Here’s why consolidating remote access integrations is essential.
The Case for Remote Access Integration Consolidation
Your product is a success, so your customer base is constantly growing. This is in no small part due to integrating remote access. You provide great aftersales support, and you can do so from your office. Your customers might even be sharing the use of the same device from hundreds of miles away.
Furthermore, your production facilities also rely on remote access to configure machines remotely.
This is all extremely helpful, for both your staff and your customers. You have just one issue. Various reasons, like cost and different product ranges being developed by different teams, have caused remote access fragmentation.
Your top range integrates one remote access solution. It does serve its purpose, but it’s very expensive, and you only use some of its features. The rest are there, but lack of support from the developer makes it hard to modify. They basically sold it to you, gave you some documentation, and left you to your own devices.
Your lower-priced range of products uses a cheaper solution. It was easy enough to integrate, but you’re not that sure how reliable the security for it is. The developers claim that there’s nothing to worry about, but you only have their word for it. There are no penetration tests or white box audits to certify that.
The situation of your factory floor machines is easier to explain.
Your network administrator has integrated an open-source solution. It’s fine in terms of costs, but it causes downtime every time it has an issue. And there is no official support for it. What RealVNC’s remote access integration team has seen here is that the factory floor is basically the wild west, with both “bring your own remote access solution” and embedded OS solutions of different types present in different manufacturing hardware. Most have little or no security, but the IT policy and insurers are demanding extremely high security. The result? The whole factory is a security risk.
The Risks of Fragmented Remote Access Integrations
All the above is causing headaches for your teams on a constant basis. Development cycles are slower because each solution must be taken into account for every major update. As various people are using various credentials to use those remote access solutions, security issues can appear.
Security Headaches
In theory, working with multiple remote access solutions and credentials might be feasible. However, doing so can also increase the potential attack surface of your product. This gives bad actors a much larger playing field.
Security management also becomes much more complicated. You will need to keep on top of the security features and issues of all the solutions in use.
This leads to security risks, both for you and your customers. And should a security breach be caused by your product, the reputational damage is difficult to repair.
Feature Inconsistency
While security is possibly the most important factor, you must also consider the development one. Namely, using several remote access solutions will inevitably mean an inconsistency in their features.
As you develop your products around the solutions you’re using, they will also face this issue. Namely, you might be using a specific SDK for one product, allowing you to develop a feature set. But, as you’re using a different solution, with some limitations, for another range, that feature set will become impossible to develop. And that, even if a customer requests it.
Keeping on top of several SDKs and APIs will become, with time, a nightmare, slowing down product development.
Downtime
If you integrate different solutions into your products, supporting them all won’t be easy. In fact, in time it will become increasingly complicated to keep on top of everything, as well as keeping your staff trained.
Therefore, if your customers face an issue, the time it takes to support them might lead to costly downtime.
The Solution? Remote Access Integration Consolidation
There is only one viable solution to the issues above. Consolidating the remote access solutions you’re integrating into one. And it will need to be one that’s reliable and can prove its security.
In RealVNC’s experience on the remote access integration front, fragmentation tends to happen in both SDK and OEM (off-the-shelf) implementations. A lot of our customers use multiple vendors and are looking to consolidate their solutions.
You need to choose a solution that not only claims it’s secure. It must be a solution that’s able to prove this. RealVNC is ISO270001-certified and can prove its security with white box audit results and penetration tests.
It is built according to its four security principles:
- You don’t have to trust RealVNC as a company to trust our software and services
- We do not record your sessions, and data cannot be decrypted now or in the future
- Every connection is treated as though it is made in a hostile environment
- The owner of the remote computer ultimately decides who is able to connect
It also adheres to the most stringent security principles.
Aside from security, it offers customized OEM and SDK remote integration solutions that you can tailor to your products.
You can find out more from some of our remote access integration resources. These include the Remote Access Redefined podcast, with insights from RealVNC experts and industry leaders on integrating remote access.
Also make sure you take a look at the OEM & SDK Playbook and Remote Access Integration Guide. These will give you a great overview of all the exciting possibilities on offer if you consolidate your remote access integrations.
