The most important aspect of dced is that it gives system administrators the ability to remotely manage services, servers, endpoints, and even objects on any host in DCE. This eliminates the frustrating and tedious task of logging into many different hosts to manage them. This also allows for scaleability because it is impractical to manage a large system by logging into all its hosts.
The features of dced are greatly enhanced when used remotely. Of course, an administrator can use dced to locally manage a host's services, but the real power of dced is in remotely managing system and application server configurations, key tables, server startup, login configurations, and cell information.
Security becomes a major issue when it comes to remote services. With the power of dced services and dcecp, it is important that only authorized principals can use them. The dced program controls access to its various objects by using ACLs. Server keys are security-sensitive data that must be seldom transmitted over the network. All key table data is encrypted when it is transmitted for secure remote key table management.
Finally, the remote capabilities of dced give you real-time status of processes and services in DCE.