Monitoring facility remotely.

As the need for social distancing becomes increasingly necessary during the COVID-19 outbreak, the benefits of being able to monitor and control building automation systems remotely becomes apparent. 

The RemoteVPN is a service offered by Contemporary Controls that allows systems integrators remote access to systems from the convenience of the systems integrator's home or office. A cloud-based VPN server hosted by Contemporary Controls provides the critical connection between two VPN clients-one installed on the systems integrator's PC and the other permanently installed on Contemporary Controls' VPN router located at the remote location. 

Using this approach, two secure VPN tunnels are created with no concern for intervening firewalls. RemoteVPN is based on OpenVPN®, a well supported open-source VPN technology. In addition to OpenVPN PC clients for Windows machines, OpenVPN clients are available for iOS and Android mobile devices for greater flexibility in accessing sites remotely. 

The company is also expanding their VPN solutions by introducing the Self-HostedVPN along with the current RemoteVPN service. With Self-HostedVPN, an EIGR-V gigabit IP router acts as the VPN server and can support their wired and cellular routers as VPN clients. This self-hosted solution lets the user set up and maintain their own remote access solution without any subscription fee and without any cloud-based VPN server.

The EIGR-V (and EIGR-VX with operating temperature −40°C to +75°C) router has an OpenVPN server that can be easily configured with the built-in webpage interface. The certificates and keys for VPN clients are also easily generated via the webpage without the user having to learn the complexities of setting up a VPN. Up to 15 IP routers and 15 PC/Tablets can be supported with this solution allowing access to 15 remote sites via cellular (EIGR-C2) or wired VPN router (EIGR-V, EIGR-VX). The webpage also Allows control access permissions for the PC/tablet/phone clients to the remote sites. OpenVPN clients are freely available for Windows, Linux, iOS and Android devices.

These VPN solutions provide secure remote access to any IP device by just using the VPN IP address for a device — without the need to setup NAT or port forwarding rules for individual devices. There is also no need for static or public IP addresses for VPN client devices, only internet access needs to be provided. For Self-HostedVPN, clients are responsible to provide a public IP address for only the EIGR-V router running as the OpenVPN server so that the VPN clients can access it. This can easily be put this behind an existing infrastructure router and use port forwarding from the infrastructure/internet router to the EIGR-V OpenVPN server. With RemoteVPN, this requirement of setting up the EIGR-V OpenVPN server with Static Public IP goes away. Both Self-HostedVPN and RemoteVPN solutions work for older IP devices where it is not possible to configure an IP gateway address on the device.

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