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I had posted two questions about the situation described in the heading last month. Thought they were eventually marked as "too broad," closed, and deleted, the preliminary comments were tremendously helpful in solving what was a rather intricate problem. (In fact, so were all the promising search results). For the sake of posterity, I wanted to post my question again (hopefully using more of the canonical language, so as not to violate the community standard for specificity) along with both the solutions that I found.
The situation: users in two different cities running windows 10 pro laptops behind standard residential high speed internet/router setups need ready access to an accounting database application currently installed on one of the computers.
The constraints: solutions cannot require any new hardware or the purchase of any new software; furthermore, because I will be administrating whatever system is put in place, it needs to be simple enough to be maintained by someone whose background in networking is limited to a careful reading of the "all-in-one for dummies" on the subject.
Question: since, if the laptops were on a local network together, simply mapping a shared drive from the laptop running the accounting application to the other would allow for concurrent access (the ideal situation) to the accounting system, which natively supports multiple users, establishing a VPN, which will simulate such a LAN connection, then mapping a drive as usual, seems like a good first attempt. Since financial data will be transmitted, security is a principal concern: before I attempt to test anything, which will involve forwarding ports on one of the routers hence an obvious security risk, what do I need to know about choosing, installing, and testing VPN software ahead of time to prevent undue exposure while learning-by-doing?
EDIT.
Another question: assume I have established a VPN connection and mapped a drive, but that the accounting application runs too slow if accessed concurrently; since the application is just a database and is designed for installation on a server, I suspect that the problem is that it has been installed on a few year old windows 10 pro laptop. There is nothing I can do about the hardware or operating system on that machine, so I need a "faster" way to connect safely. Although originally meant for network administration tasks, RDP seems like a possible solution, since it works natively with the operating systems and has a mechanism to prevent concurrent access to the system. So, I ask the analogous question to the above, but about RDP instead of VPN: what do I need to know to safely get started with testing?