Best solution: shared desktop for accessing IP blocked external resources

Question

Hi,

Our use case is as follows:
In our business we are accessing multiple external/partner web applications and API's which are behind firewalls. Currently our partners are whitelisting our office IP to give access to their resources. That means that our consultants can't access the partner applications from their home.

We want to set-up a very simple and lightweight remote desktop like solution in Azure where users can logon and access the external resources through a web browser or API tooling (such as Postman). The estimated number of concurrent users is around 5.

We understand that Azure provides multiple options to accomplish this use case such as jumpbox VM (with or without Bastion) or Azure Virtual Desktop.

Which Azure service or concept is the best fitting for our use case in terms of effectiveness and costs?

We would like to hear your thoughts.

Regards,
Bert

Answer 1

The best solution will be Azure Virtual Desktop. This scales to your needs. Also, it is possible to have an static outbound IP-adres with the use of a NAT-Gateway. So you can whitelist your API's to only accept requests from your Azure Virtual Desktop environment!