HITS

Although remote access to Windows and Linux desktop computers has been possible for a long time, Mac desktop owners have not had access to many of the same capabilities.

Now, however, Teradici Cloud Access Software (CAS), its remote desktop and workstation software solution, enables remote access to Mac workstations while still offering a high quality remote computing experience with “high color fidelity, crisp text, and up to 4K UHD resolution for all types of high-performance workflows,” according to the company.

“Remote desktops for macOS enterprise use cases – that’s a new thing,” Ian Main, technical marketing principal at Teradici, said Sept. 9 during the webinar “Remoting 101: How to Remote Your Mac.”

Use cases including content creation and DevOps “haven’t really been available to the macOS community in the past,” he said. There have been some tools available that have enabled certain limited capabilities “but nothing that could give you that native desktop experience” until now, he noted.

“Enterprises in general have been doing remote desktops and virtualization for several years now, and primarily Windows and Linux desktops” have been used for that, he pointed out.

“But now what we’re doing is we’re welcoming macOS hosts, which is a really big step forward for the industry,” he told viewers.

The Benefits of PCoIP

PC-over-IP (PCoIP) technology is used to connect desktops to end points. Advantages of PCoIP include: the fact that it provides a high-performance user experience; ease of deployment and management via a simple and reliable solution; “ultra secure remoting and endpoint architecture”; and the “widest platform flexibility” and complete multicloud support, according to Teradici.

While most protocols only support H.264 4:2:0 chroma-subsampling for high frame rates at limited fidelity, PCoIP also scales to support high frame rates at RGB 888 fidelity that is demanded by graphics professionals who require wide gamut color accuracy, the company says.

PCoIP also “continuously senses the network availability and predicts optimum image quality and frame rate in real-time, always preserving the crisp nature of text and fine details,” according to Teradici.

The technology works on any network and, unlike other protocols, PCoIP “transitions seamlessly to 100% lossless without bursty retransmission of image content,” the company says, adding it also offers “unrivalled color accuracy.”

“What we do is we take the display image from the centralized computer, we compress it and we encrypt it and we stream it down to the user,” Main explained.

What the PCoIP protocol brings is “this really secure way of connecting the host down to the endpoint,” he added. “And no data is transferred. So what we have is only pixels transferred across that network down to the endpoint.”

In addition to the security, the protocol provides consolidation. All the “resources are centralized, so IT can be focused on back-end delivery of the high-value tasks rather than all the desktop maintenance,” Main pointed out.

In the past year or two, the focus has shifted to the “versatility of this environment” as many people shifted to working from home due to the pandemic, he said. This year, many have shifted to hybrid workflows and need to access centralized resources either from home or the office, he noted, pointing out many people will be working a few days from home and a few days from the office.

This shift has also benefited employers who can now hire people from different locations across the country and world, he said.

“The world is moving to this hybrid model of desktops, whether they’re on premises in data centers or in public clouds and the users can be anywhere – so this is a really fantastic story,” he told viewers.

Security

“Security is also becoming a key [part of] this whole story,” Main said, explaining: “What we’re trying to do is get the data off those endpoints because that can be high-value” intellectual property.

The data is “now all centralized and locked up in a secure network,” he noted, adding there is no virtual private network (VPN) used and the encrypted pixel stream is transmitted from the desktop to the endpoint.

Eighty percent of movie studios’ remote workstations use Teradici technology now, he went on to say.

The Added Benefits of CAS

Teradici CAS “provides [a] high-performance, high-quality, secure remote desktop experience from anywhere,” according to Mirela Cunjalo, director of product management at Teradici CAS.

CAS is “built on top of” PCoIP and “offers all the benefits” of using the protocol, she said.

Features of CAS include: up to 4K UHD resolution; low-latency peripheral support; support for macOS, Windows and Linux environments; flexible licensing options; customization capability; and on-premise, public cloud, hybrid and multicloud environment support, according to Teradici.

Teradici CAS is especially helpful for people working in the media and entertainment sector because it “enables remote access to Mac workstations for graphics intensive applications common in industries like VFX, animation, game development, 3D modeling, video editing, engineering and more,” according to Teradici.

The company also provided a demonstration  of a remote Mac workstation running Avid Media Composer.