Last time we wrote about reaching a work PC's desktop from anywhere without opening your network. Remote Desktop is the obvious thing people want to reach — but once you've got someone working from home or on the road, it's rarely the only thing.

They need the shared drive. The accounting database the software on the server talks to. The admin page for the NAS so someone can check a backup ran. The web page on the label printer, the CCTV box, the little internal tool that only lives on one machine in the office. None of those are a desktop — they're services, and the usual way to reach them from outside is exactly the way you shouldn't: open another port on the router and hope.

Reach treats all of them the same way it treats Remote Desktop. You reach the one service you need, over a connection tied to who you are, with nothing exposed to the internet.

How it works

On the machine that hosts the service — the office server, the NAS, the PC the database lives on — you turn on "Share this PC." On your laptop, you add a forward: you tell Reach which service you want, and it opens a local address on your own machine for it. From then on you point your normal app — Windows Explorer, your database client, a web browser — at that local address, and it behaves exactly as if the service were running on the laptop in front of you.

Behind the scenes Reach is carrying the connection out to the office machine, which might be behind the office router, on home broadband, or in another state. No port opened on the router. Nothing for scanners on the internet to find. No static IP to chase.

Remote Desktop, or just the service?

Fair question, since we just wrote about Remote Desktop: when do you want the whole desktop, and when do you want one of these forwards? They're the same feature underneath — "Share this PC" is the door, and Remote Desktop and a forward are two ways through it. The difference is simply how much you need:

  • The whole desktop when you need to use the machine — run the program that lives on it, click around, see the screen. It's the full experience, and it needs a Windows Pro machine on the far end to host it.
  • Just the service when you only need the one thing — the file share, the database, the NAS page. It's lighter, it works for gear that doesn't even have a desktop (a NAS, a router, a Linux server), and it doesn't tie up the machine for whoever's sitting at it.

Short version: need to see the screen, use Remote Desktop; need to reach something on the machine, use a forward. Plenty of businesses use both to the same server.

What small businesses actually reach this way

  • The shared drive. Get to the office file share from home without a VPN that hands your laptop the run of the whole network.
  • The database. Reach the database your accounting, point-of-sale or job-management software uses — with your normal client — without that database ever being open to the internet. (An exposed database is one of the easiest ways a small business gets held to ransom.)
  • The NAS, the router, the gear with a web page. Check a backup, change a setting, look at the cameras — the admin page that should never face the internet, reached safely from wherever you are.
  • That one internal tool. The licence server, the booking system, the thing that only runs on the machine in the corner. If it listens on a network port, Reach can carry it.

The honest bits

  • Reach gets you to the service — the service still has its own login. A forwarded database still wants its username and password; the NAS page still wants you to sign in. That's on purpose: Reach controls who can reach the service, and the service controls what they can do. Two locks, not one.
  • It's for machines you own or manage — your office server, your NAS, your fleet. The far end has to be a machine you've set up to share. It isn't for poking at something on a network that isn't yours.
  • Grant it carefully. You can give one specific service to one specific person — the bookkeeper gets to the accounting database and nothing else on the server, the contractor gets the one tool they're there to fix.

If the honest version of "working from anywhere" at your business is more than just the desktop — and it almost always is — this is the piece that covers the rest. The drive, the database, the admin page, the lot: reachable from anywhere, with nothing left exposed.

This is part of TYO Reach. Already a Reach user? Add a forward from the tray. New to Reach? Start here.