General aspects

How Remote Control works

Remote Control is a technique to tunnel protocol traffic (such as VNC, Telnet and SSH) to the cloud without opening any ports at the gateway. Thus Remote Control is a secure way to directly access low level protocols on devices through the Cloud of Things platform UI in a web browser.

The following protocols are supported:

• Remote Desktop (VNC)
• Secure Shell (SSH)
• Terminal (Telnet)

See Supported protocols and gateways for details.

Remote Control works as in the illustration below. The remotely controlled device runs a VNC, SSH or Telnet server and is connected to a gateway compatible with Remote Control. This gateway must be registered as a device within the Device Management application in Cloud of Things. More information about registering devices and instructions can be found in Device Management > Connecting devices > Device registration in the User guide.

With Remote Control users can

• view status visualizations and track updates of remote devices directly in the same way as if you were at the device location.
• connect to remote devices easily as complex VPN setups are not required.
• establish a connection via Telnet or SSH to the gateway itself or to any device in the local area network.

The connection to remote devices is securely encrypted through TLS technology. Additionally, passwords are encrypted in your Cloud of Things account, so that you do not need to manage them elsewhere.

When to use Remote Control

To provide the best level of control, remote devices should be represented as devices in the Device Management of Cloud of Things, with the corresponding reporting, remote control and real-time functionality.

In some cases however, it is not possible or not economic to implement every aspect of a machine or remote device in a Cloud of Things agent. For example, in case of a legacy device that does not have APIs for accessing certain parts of the functionality, or in case of a device that has many very low-level configuration parameters that would be very involved to map to Cloud of Things.

In these cases, you can use Remote Control to securely manage remote devices. The benefit is that you manage the device in the same way as if you had it physically close to you.