NOTE: This product review was published by VirtualizationHowTo.com (see the full review here).  

We are right in the middle of most organizations supporting a work-from-home stance for the majority of their employees due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Many organizations may have had to scramble to get something put together quickly to support their remote workforce if they didn’t already have something in place. Providing a digital workspace for remote workers may have been a challenge.

Now, the pandemic has turned into a longer-term situation requiring organizations, including your own, to support remote workers for a much longer period of time. 

With this being said, many are shifting their focus, and potentially the solution they are using to empower remote workers to carry out their job responsibilities.  In addition, solutions that may have been the easiest to stand up in phase 1 of the pandemic, may have compromised important objectives such as security. 

Traditional solutions such as RDSH, VPN, and VDI are complicated to configure and support.  Let’s take a look at a digital workspace solution that could quite possibly be the easiest solution available on the market to enable remote workers without compromising security and other features, while transforming your workforce.  The solution is called Cameyo. 

What is Cameyo?

Cameyo is an end-to-end virtual application delivery solution that allows simple and secure delivery of Windows and internal Web Apps to remote workers without the need for VPNs.  VPNs can be problematic from a manageability, data exfiltration risk, and performance standpoint.  Cameyo is a solution that helps to solve all three of these key requirements for remote workers and provide an easy way for organizations to create an effective digital workspace to empower productivity.

Using Cameyo, your business-critical apps are delivered via an HTML5-driven web browser session instead of relying on “expensive” network TCP/IP VPN tunnels.  This helps to ensure that applications are delivered with a great user experience, even with remote worker’s low-bandwidth home network connections.

Cameyo is a cloud-native platform that allows having the flexibility to run your workloads from any type of environment.  This includes any cloud environment, hybrid configurations, and on-premises.

How Does Cameyo Work?

Cameyo is a cloud-native virtual application delivery platform that is layered on top of Windows Server Remote Desktop Services (RDS) that allows providing your remote workers an easy as well as secure digital workspace.  However, rather than having to struggle with the complexity of standing up remote desktop gateway servers and session hosts and the complexity and infrastructure that involves, Cameyo takes care of the heavy lifting and eliminates the need for you to configure the traditional RDS components.

Even though Cameyo operates on top of RDS functionality in Windows Server, it does not require RDP ports to be opened to your end users in the outside world. 

How does it protect RDP?

RDP is an extremely dangerous protocol to have exposed to the Internet.  When you enable RDP, you are enabling ports 3389, 3387, and 3392.  Servers with RDP enabled are vulnerable to RDP brute-force attacks where hackers can use brute force login attempts to “guess” or “crack” passwords that may be weak or based on known dictionary values. The last thing you want to worry about with your digital workspace is the security of the solution for remote workers.

Cameyo uses what is referred to as RDP port shield technology that provides a dynamic firewall which addresses threats to RDP by closing those ports at the Windows firewall level.  These ports are only dynamically opened based on the authenticated users when and if they are needed (such as for admins).  The RDP port shield operates in real-time to white-list traffic bound for RDP when this type of connectivity is needed for administrators, etc.

Data Persistence (Session Sync)

Cameyo delivers applications to your remote workforce in what it calls a “Play” session.  When the user disconnects, all remnants of the play are deleted.  This means that Cameyo maintains a pristine Windows Server state.  What about user data?  How is this persisted?  Cameyo carries out an interesting process to synchronize user data to the Google Cloud Storage bucket.  This includes user’s profile directory and registry (HKCU) settings.

This helps to accomplish the best of both worlds with data persistence for the end user and security of the underlying server. 

Cameyo Installation

The process to install a new Cameyo server is straightforward.  Login to your Cameyo dashboard and click the Create button next to the Servers section in the dashboard.