Once you move beyond a handful of remote PCs it becomes more and more difficult to deal with problems arising at remote sites.

With small compact networks, the worst case is that you just nip out and fix the problem. As the scale increases most people move to one of the cheapo PC Remote Access programs but they run out of steam as the scale of the network increases. Really large distributed networks need to be able to access the remote PCs even when the users aren’t there as the need to do updates and not just fault fixing increases substantially with the scale of the network.

Of course the problem is that if you’re going to allow remote access to unattended remote PCs then all kinds of security issues arise. Not only do you want to ensure that only authorised help-desk people can gain access to those remote PCs but you’re going to need encryption to deal with what’s often rather sensitive information being transferred to and from those remote PCs.

Finally, it’s all got to be easy. Security is essential obviously but it needs to be unobtrusive so that it doesn’t interfere with the interaction between the help desk and the remote users that they’re trying to help.