Continuing our series on iPad applications for businesses, this week we take a look at apps for IT professionals. This is one category of worker most often tasked with doing remote work, often during emergencies. The tablet form factor is attractive to many grizzled system admins on the go, and there are plenty of apps designed just for them. We take a look at SSH, remote desktop and VNC, remote support and server administration apps.
SSH
SSH is the most basic yet powerful ways to remotely administer your servers. iSSH (above) and Prompt (below) are two of the most popular SSH clients for the iPad. TinyTerm has a strong following as well. iSSH also supports VNC connections, so it could serve as quite a powerhouse app for admins that rely heavily on SSH and VNC.
Remote Desktop and VNC
Citrix has been aggressive about porting its Citrix Receiver virtual desktop application to multiple devices, and the iPad is no exception. VMware View is a competing product for accessing virtual desktops.
As for RDP, there are gobs of clients out there, but iTap (above) and Jump Desktop (below) have perhaps the strongest followings. Jump supports both VNC and RDP. Both iTap and Jump support arrow keys on Bluetooth keyboards.
As mentioned above, iSSH supports VNC, so if you need VNC, not RDP, it’s worth a look.
If you really must have something free, Remote Desktop Lite and VNC Lite, both from MochaSoft, offer a set of basic features at no cost.
Remote Support
But what about remote support for end-users? Bomgar offers its iPad Rep Console (above), and Citrix has its GoToManage app for iPad.
Server Administration
If SSH and remote desktops won’t cut it, there are a few other tools for server administrators worth looking at.
Rove Mobile Admin Client (above) provides a mobile interface for several enterprise IT tools, such as Rove Monitoring System, Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, Symantec Backup Exec and BMC Remedy Service Desk. Users need to already have Rove Mobile Admin IT.
VMware offers an iPad client for its vSphere product (above). For those administrating Rackspace environments, the company has released its own iPad app.
For more simple monitoring, iStat is an interesting little app that provides information on both your iOS device’s battery life and other statistics, and on remote Macintosh servers. Server Admin Remote offers similar features for Mac server monitoring.
If you need non-Mac monitoring,
Spiceworks has an iOS app for its IT software-as-a-service.
For the old school, MochaSoft’s TN5250 is a terminal emulator that provides access IBM AS/400 mainframes.
