Portal Implementation Intranet vs Public

[ahagopian_coj]

We are getting ready to implement Portal here.  Our vision was to have it on our intranet in order to have only city staff be able to access data and maps.  We want to use windows credentials to have Portal authenticate users and prevent multiple logins for users, essentially a better sign on experience especially for secure services.

Our consultant says if we do that then any GPS data collected with Field Maps will require the user to be on a VPN in order to upload back to the data store.  He also said we will still have to maintain our cloud based AGOL account for our public facing apps and that employees will staff have to login.  2 questions…1) Does a secure wifi connection count for Portal to authenticate the user as being inside the intranet?  2) Is there anyway to install Portal to be the way we want but also still pick and choose the public side such as using Hub?

I have attached a diagram of our current ArcGIS Server setup.

 

Any suggestion would be greatly appreciated!

[Brian_Wilson]

Our Portal is accessible over the Internet on port 443, which means it's reachable for things like Field Maps. We run publicly accessible services there too. We are a small shop and trade off budgets and complexity. It works for us.

Ask for a demo, and have the consultant walk through the steps to use the proposed VPN on a field device, have a real field worker tell you what they think of it. 

The consultant would be remiss if they did not recommend a VPN but ultimately it has to work for you and if it does not, it's a waste of money.

Field workers have lots of distractions going on and if you give them tools that are clumsy and hard to use, they will just use a notepad and a pencil. 

And frankly, it's REALLY hard to beat a pencil and clipboard when it comes to field work.