How do I access the university’s VPN or a virtual desktop when I am not on campus?

If you are not on campus, most university IT services such as email, OneDrive and Office 365 can be accessed from anywhere with a good internet connection.  However, there may be circumstances where you need to access the university desktop environment.

You can access the university’s online environment when you are off campus. There are two options using our Virtual Desktop. It is important to understand the differences between them so that you use the workspace best suited for your needs. Each one contains a different selection of academic software suites and resources.

Virtual workspace

This is the main offering which will allow you to reach most of the academic software available at the University. Web browsing, editing and creating Microsoft Office documents, as well as university software access is all available here. Your files are stored and presented via Microsoft OneDrive and can be used with any number of software suites available in the university workspace.

Enhanced workspace

This provides remote access to specialised academic software packages and should only be used for course-specific work. This can be used to work on files and code specific to your course. Please note, this is not for running large computer intensive jobs over a prolonged period of time. Tasks of this nature will perform poorly on the service and work may be lost due to the service logging out disconnected sessions after a period of time.

There is limited availability of our virtual desktops and you can see how many are available by using Lab Computer Availability - University Of Surrey. These are allocated on a first come first served basis and cannot be booked in advance. You will need to be in the Workspaces.surrey.sc.uk environment (which you can use in your web browser) to access both the virtual workspaces.