defyant_2004 (12/17/2013)
I am still not seeing what functions on the server they would need. If they can work in SSMS from their machine, why do they need to login to the Server to use SSMS their? It seems like I would be creating more risk in the environment by letting them login to the machine. Are their resources on the server they need access to?
99.9999% of the time you can do nearly everything with SSMS. It is that small percentage of things, which is usually during an outage, that you need access to the box. Paranoia seems to be more important than teamwork in your shop. The bottom line is that there is no right answer here. That should be obvious from the myriad of opinions you have received so far. If preventing RDP access to the DBA works in your environment then that is what you should do.
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