We performed a comparison between BeyondTrust Privileged Remote Access and Microsoft Remote Desktop Services based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Remote Access solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."One of the features that I really like about it is the ability to set a start date, time, and end date for the access. For example, you can set the access for a person from tomorrow, Monday, or Tuesday and ending on a specific period of the day or a specific date. That's really quite helpful."
"We like the integration with Active Directory. It allows us to discover the endpoints and user accounts that need protection. It's a good way of securing our privileged access."
"Its initial setup process is straightforward."
"Its security, simplicity, and ease of deployment and maintenance are the most valuable. It is FIPS compliant, so it goes through severe penetration testing every one year or two years. They have to maintain this compliance. It is very safe. Customers have been using it in the last eight years because of the simplicity of getting it deployed quickly. Most of the people using the solution had been hacked already, so they needed it quickly. As compared to the other solutions in the market, it can be turned on in production very quickly. You don't really need to have a server. It can be deployed very rapidly on VMware or Hyper-V, and you don't need to do an installation. It is a kind of an all-included package that you just deploy in a VM environment. It is basically a VM that is specifically built for a customer. The way the PRA data solutions work is that you need to build them for each customer because of being hard-coded with their SSL certificate, their web page name, and all that."
"PRA stands on its own as a full solution. This is important because it reduces the need to maintain a lot of different services. Also, the integration between those services are sometimes not easy to maintain. So, having a solution like BeyondTrust Privileged Remote Access reducing our workload gives us enough time to work on our other issues. The system just runs and does what it is supposed to do."
"I like all of it. You can access computers that are on a DMZ. You can access computers that are off the network and on the network. You pretty much have access to computers wherever they are. As long as they have the client on them, you can get to them. So, it is convenient, but its main feature is that you can use your smart card to elevate your privileges remotely. That's a great feature."
"When it comes to the Privileged Remote Access (PRA) solution, instead of depending on a VPN client, from Cisco or any other vendor, we can directly use this product from the internet. It is very easy to do the implementation, and it is easy for every user to access the server from outside of their organization. They can open the URL and put their name and password, and it'll do the multi-factor authentication. They can easily access the server. Prior to this solution, the users had to log into the VPN, which is not required with BeyondTrust. Now, they can use their computer over the internet."
"The product has improved remote support capabilities since it works fine."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Remote Desktop Services is managing the remote desktop end user or remote server."
"We have scaled the solution and find this easy to do."
"The solution is easy to deploy and there are many features available that you can turn on or off depending on your budget."
"It's almost an out of the box function once you have installed the other components."
"I like that it works. In most cases, it's predictable. You know what you get."
"Installing Microsoft Desktop Services is straightforward."
"The product saves time."
"The most valuable features are it is fast and cost-effective."
"They could probably integrate a wizard or something like that to add a new use case. It could be something that makes it easier to add a new use case."
"The issue I found with the product revolves around the fact that RDP and SSH sessions take too much time, making it an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The integration of the solution with many platforms is a difficult area to manage and needs to be made easy."
"The solution is very flexible, which is a plus, but I would say the implementation requires someone with knowledge and experience, as it can be easy to get lost in all the details. The implementation process could be streamlined and simplified. Though the complexity of the solution provides greater flexibility, it requires a lot of time to understand it fully."
"I would love to have a web console and the ability to use the smart card with the web console to provide remote support. If you are on a computer that doesn't have the Bomgar console, you should be able to use the web console to provide support. That's the only thing right now. A web console is nice when you're jumping into a computer, but if you need to elevate the privileges, you currently can't do it with the smart card. If they could figure that out, that would be money."
"One of our gaps or pain points is having multi-factor authentication at the endpoint and using the PRA password injection from BeyondTrust, which does not work in our environment. We can only have MFA at the login of BeyondTrust to check out the password. Therefore, we can't meet our security requirements of having it on the endpoint."
"At the moment, I don't see any major problems with it. If anything, they can just change the look and feel of the login screen because it looks too simple to me. It does not have so much information. When you get to the login screen of the solution, you should have more information. We also have BeyondTrust Remote Support, and the login page looks similar to BeyondTrust Privilege Remote Access. I would love to see more rich information on the login screen or landing page so that rather than having a regular sign-in screen or page where you just provide a username and password and get into the solution, you should have more insight into what the solution does. I've mentioned this to them every time I have had an opportunity."
"There is no connectivity to the appliance side. There is no API, and it is just difficult for me to capture what version the device is on without going in and doing screenshots. It is a little too secure in that regard, where they don't even trust their product owner. Since a lot of hacks come from the inside, they are probably doing what they need to do out of necessity. It is just that I have to work pretty hard to produce compliance data on the box."
"There have been some network issues in the solution. So, when we used to connect it, the solution suddenly got disconnected. So the network part needs to be improved."
"There could be some improvement in the integration of the solution."
"Microsoft Remote Desktop Services could improve by having graphical acceleration."
"We are searching for a product with better remote access and remote sessions."
"I would like to see a web-based interface, instead of client installation to refresh the UI through HTML."
"The product is not very scalable."
"The only issue I experienced was with the initialization of the session, which affected the stability of the solution."
"I would like to be able to leverage it on other operating systems."
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BeyondTrust Privileged Remote Access is ranked 6th in Remote Access with 21 reviews while Microsoft Remote Desktop Services is ranked 2nd in Remote Access with 76 reviews. BeyondTrust Privileged Remote Access is rated 8.6, while Microsoft Remote Desktop Services is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of BeyondTrust Privileged Remote Access writes "Our support team can do so much more without having to actively engage our customers, which saves us time and money". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Remote Desktop Services writes "Easy to set up and reliable, but needs an additional control panel". BeyondTrust Privileged Remote Access is most compared with CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, Citrix DaaS (formerly Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service), WALLIX Bastion, BeyondTrust Remote Support and F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM), whereas Microsoft Remote Desktop Services is most compared with TeamViewer, VMware Horizon, Citrix Workspace, VMware Workstation and Parallels Access. See our BeyondTrust Privileged Remote Access vs. Microsoft Remote Desktop Services report.
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