Campus Computer Lab Remote Access Solution
Enabling secure, scheduled, and isolated remote student access to physical departmental workstation hardware using Devolutions Remote Desktop Manager.
The Technical Problem
Higher education academic programs in architecture, engineering, computer graphics, and GIS depend on heavy desktop software suites (AutoCAD, Revit, SolidWorks, Adobe Creative Cloud, ArcGIS). These applications cannot easily run on low-powered student laptops or Chromebooks.
When students work remotely or attend hybrid evening courses, physical labs sit idle while students struggle with software access. Traditional VPNs grant excessive network exposure to unmanaged personal devices, posing severe security and malware infection risks.
The Ace Secure Tech RDM Architecture
Ace Secure Tech designs a customized Devolutions Remote Desktop Manager and Devolutions Server (DVLS) architecture that securely connects students to campus lab hardware without exposing internal subnets:
1. Zero-Trust Gateway Broker
Students authenticate against the university single sign-on (SSO). The connection is proxied through a hardened Devolutions Gateway. No direct IP routing between student endpoints and the internal university network occurs.
2. Ephemeral User Credential Injection
Students do not receive raw workstation administrator passwords. Devolutions RDM securely passes isolated student user tokens into the active remote session, preventing password capture or unauthorized lateral access.
3. Automated Idle Timeouts & Reset Scripts
Custom post-session scripts trigger Deep Freeze, reboot scripts, or sandbox rollbacks upon student disconnection, guaranteeing the next student encounters a clean environment.
Technical Specifications Summary
- Supported Client OS: Windows 10/11, macOS, Linux, Web Browser HTML5 client
- Protocol Support: High-FPS RDP with RemoteFX/GPU acceleration, Secure Shell (SSH)
- Identity Providers: Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD), Okta, Shibboleth SAML, LDAP
- Auditing: Centralized connection timestamping and session disconnect logging