Best Practices for GIS Teams Working Remotely without Enterprise

Question

Hello Community-

My org has multiple departments that are part-time GIS users. Since March of 2020 those teams have been doing most of their GIS via ArcGIS online and a file server accessed via Remote Desktop. As the GIS Manager I've been doing my own work using OneDrive with minimal issues. We don't use shared editing when working locally and don't have an Enterprise license.

The RDP we use is very slow and our IT team doesn't want to use VPN. With these limitations in mind I've been wondering about an approach where we use an Azure VM to act as a file server that would hold ArcGIS Pro projects and FGDBs/Shapefiles/csv's etc.

So, I'm here to understand what folks are doing with similar limitations or if there are any known best practices that can help inform my thinking.

Thanks in advance.

NicoSum · Answer

Also generally interested on how folks make this work because the remote into desktop solution.

jcarlson · Answer

It really does depend on what kind of work you're doing. If you need to share data layers, you can try something like a distributed geodatabase. You could also try using something like GitHub to serve as a central repository for smaller files, like Project files, CSVs, and the like.

Sean_Wray · Answer

We use VPN and Remote Desktop. Workers open a VPN to access network resources and either remote into the computer at their desk OR a VM that IT sets up for them. That way they ae essentially working on a "local" network and only using the machine at home to display everything.

The most likely bottleneck will likely be internet connections at home. For me, this woks great.