2018-01-18 21:29 AEST by Arthur Barrett - I've seen a few products lately that run on a 'local' PC but are managed through a cloud based portal. Sophos 
is the most recent one.  It's like a vmware vcenter approach to management where you don't actually 'login' to 
the server to do the management - it's managed using a cloud based app instead.

What's the advantage of that over a web app directly on the server, accessed via mdns?  well the server really 
doesn't need any type of direct remote access - it can 'poll' the management server for policy updates.

But in theory if the admin interface can run on our 'cloud' then it can also run locally if you prefer.  i.e.: it 
offers both a 'remote management' and a 'local management' option.  When you install the server you would 
select what the 'management server' will be 'march hare cloud' or 'local management'.