RDM - Remote Desktop Madness: Harnessed
December 12, 2017
RDM - Remote Desktop Madness: Harnessed
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Remote Desktop Manager
I am using the full version as a personally paid version due to the significant value it provided me. I have influenced others to use the free version and make the decision for themselves, however the company has not purchased it for anyone.
- Connects to MANY different connection types such as FTP, SSH, and RDP (to name the ones I personally used). Also interfaces with many other solutions/application to extend that connectivity to a variety of other applications such as SQL Server Management Studio, WinSCP, etc. Even tools that duplicate RDM, such as Putty, so you don't have to rebuild from scratch.
- Maintains credentials from a variety of secured sources, both local and remote. Can link to multiple back-end credential managers as well, including KeePass, Secret Server, etc. Also offers their own RDM Server that backends RDM with Enterprise Level Credential Management, if another option is not already being used (or even if it is, actually - it supports multiple connections).
- Can chain connections to make a single process for connecting to a specific resource. The most common example is VPN connection required before connecting to a remote server.
- Supports many 2FA/MFA solutions including Google and Duo (the two I use currently) Others are supported but need to be looked up (don't have the list readily available).
- 2FA solutions - Need more of the enterprise options. In particular, RSA's solution is NOT supported but used by so many as to be something that should really be added if at all possible.
- Connection Setups - The online manual is very large due to the number of options available making it difficult to figure out what is needed to complete a connection setup. Perhaps a wizard or something to simplify setup for the most common setups would be helpful.
- It is a significant positive impact mostly by driving down the cost of credential management (no more locked out passwords due to too many failed attempts).
- It also has saved a significant amount of time preventing me from needing to lookup server names and/or credentials for logging in thus making me more productive in actually accomplishing what is needed.
- It has allowed me to be significantly more secure by creating passwords using best practices, and applying different passwords for each credential needed.
For the first 3, they are good connection managers, but they didn't track credentials across all the different connection types required. I needed Putty for SSH, RDPMan for RDP connections, and other tools for their connections. Moreover, many didn't support tabbed or multi-connection interfaces, making it difficult to have a couple of server connections open at the same time. As for the others, the credential management is nice because it auto fills the space based on the connection type, and isn't tied only to a website, nor does it require me to cut and paste, exposing credentials to the clipboard, or forcing me to retype them into the appropriate fields. Moreover, for the last 2 in particular, I was able to use them as a credential store and access them using RDM so as to not invalidate my use of them, and actually extending their value in each company where it is/was used.