Vanessa,
To amplify a bit on Rick's excellent advice, if you or your developers
need to log in from Windows workstations, there are ssh clients for the
Windows environments also. I use one called SecureCRT. It works well with
both RH and SuSE Linux machines as the remote device. I log in as my user
name (mknecht) using ssh, then do a 'su -' in the resulting terminal to
manage my email server. I am a total Linux putz, and this works very well
for me.
As I understand the system, it's a pretty secure and safe way to work.
SecureCRT is too expensive (IMO) so maybe look for competing solutions.