I went the Virtual desktop route with 4 users, and you are correct it is expensive. I have justified it by reminding myself that the data is safe outside of the office. If there is a fire, theft or flood all data is somewhere else. Stating that I have been working with Dataverse and SharePoint moving tables slowly over to see the speed impact of retrieving data from a lower cost source other than a virtual desktop. I currently have over twenty tables and some of the tables have over 26K in records at this point and will continue to grow. The common route from all my reading is to go to SQL and use a low-cost host. I know there is a seminar that Richard has produced and there is a lot of discussion in this forum going that route. I keep circling back to I want to use PowerApps and Access with the same data source.  Microsoft has put a lot of resources into Dataverse and there are several videos to watch discussing the data verse connector. Once you understand the permissions setup in Dataverse environment things go smoother.  The biggest flaw with Virtual desktop, besides cost is printing, we use several printers for different tasks and the Virtual Desktop just cannot route printing properly. I have had to make work arounds for printing, and it's a pain. The other issue that we have had to work on is daily workflow, word, excel, access, outlook, web pages. If you try to use the Virtual Desktop just like your local desktop you will struggle with memory issues. I have upgraded three times on memory to 16 GB on the host virtual server and that has helped.

Hi Caleb, do you connect from your home remotely via the Internet to the backend in your office?  Is that a SQL Server backend?

You can use Google Remote Desktop ( free: https://remotedesktop.google.com/home ) at your home, or anywhere on the Internet, to connect to a host PC in your office.  That would be the easiest way to have a remote connection.  But only one user can connect to the host PC at a time.  Your other users can't use it while you're using it.

Regarding each user having their own backends, do your users need to share tables?  If they do, and if you put the same table(s) into each user's local backend, it may be hard to track the changes the users make, if not impossible.  If both User A and User B makes changes to row 1-10 in Table 1, you'll need a way to find out which user made the latest changes, and upload only the latest changes to the main backend at the end of the day.  This is a tall task because you need a complex logging system to do that, even if you have only 2-3 users, but it only takes one mistake in syncing the backend to ruin your database.  In short, this is the least desirable solution.

Another way to improve performance in remote usage is to re-design your database in terms of how your frontend retrieves data efficiently in a remote connection.  For instance, when you do a Google search, Google doesn't show you millions of results all at once, but only about 20 at a time.  Your database needs to do the same -- retrieve only the data the user needs, not more, not less.  When your user views a record, make sure only that record is retrieved.  You can't have him open a form or table with 10k records on the screen, as Access typically does.  With a proper design, Access CAN retrieve remote data at a respectable speed.  Please see my video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJyKZRRWHnU .  It demonstrates using local data versus remote data on the same Access frontend.  Some remote data retrievals are almost as fast as local data retrievals, while some aren't.  My backend is SQL Server on Winhost.

Thanks guys. Great tips. It is not an SQL Server backend. It's just Access. I think I'll keep plugging away with the current setup until I can't stand it anymore and then I'll look into converting to an SQL Server. That seems like the best bet.