Tell us who works from where and what they open, and we will take it from there. Call (604) 813-7881 and ask for Tony, or send us a note. Regular hours are Monday to Friday, 7am to 5pm MT, and a person answers emergency calls on the same number 24/7.
Safe remote access for accounting firms
Staff work from home and everything crawls. Is there a safer way?
Slow files, dropped connections and a nagging worry about who can get in from outside. Here is the risk, what good looks like, and what we do.
Free consult with Tony. No pressure, no jargon.
The risk with remote work
A bookkeeper connects from home over a VPN, opens QuickBooks on their own computer, and every click waits while the company file travels across the internet. A drop mid save can leave the file damaged. Elsewhere, remote desktop may still be open to the internet from years ago, and nobody has looked at it since.
Good looks like work that happens on a computer inside the office, with only the screen travelling home, through a secured gateway with MFA. A stolen password alone is not enough.
We set remote access up so the file never leaves the building. For the shared stack (Hyper-V, RAID 10, Meraki, Huntress, MFA and backups), see the accounting IT support overview and why firms run servers on Hyper-V.
What we put in place
- Remote desktop on the app server. Staff open QuickBooks and tax software on the dedicated app server. The company file stays in the office. Why Hyper-V.
- Never exposed to the internet. Access goes through a secured gateway with MFA. Remote desktop left open to the internet is a common way attackers get in.
- The right way in for your firm. It can be streamed applications, Citrix, Parallels RAS, a zero trust VPN that checks who you are and which device you are using before it opens one application at a time, or RustDesk that we harden and lock down. We will tell you plainly which one suits your firm.
- A firewall and separate networks. A Meraki firewall sized to your internet speed, with servers, staff, guests and printers on their own lanes.
- Huntress on every managed computer. Endpoint protection with Huntress on every managed computer, plus DNS filtering. If something looks wrong, our security operations team (SOC), the people who watch for threats around the clock, sends a text alert. Laptops are kept patched, with disk encryption on by default unless your software vendor says otherwise. A person answers emergencies 24/7 on (604) 813-7881.
Intuit’s own guide to remote desktop for QuickBooks Enterprise takes the same view: do the work next to the file. Read Intuit’s guide.
Also see
Remote access questions we hear
Why not just use a VPN?
A VPN can be fine for light work like email or a document. The trouble starts when a chatty program such as QuickBooks reads its data across it. A dropped connection mid save is also a risk to the file. Remote desktop on the server keeps the data inside the office.
Is remote desktop safe?
Set up properly, yes. The key is that it is never exposed to the internet, and that sign in goes through a secured gateway with MFA. Remote desktop left open to the internet is a different story.
Do we need extra licences?
Usually, yes. Remote desktop sessions need their own RDS CALs on top of Windows Server CALs. We confirm exactly what you need for your setup before you buy anything.