Client Story
From Servers Under Desks to a Fully Managed Cloud
How Soliant.cloud Returned Time and Peace of Mind to Thorsen Consulting
Thorsen Consulting founder Molly Connolly has spent nearly 30 years searching for a hosting partner who would truly manage her clients’ mission-critical FileMaker environments. Soliant.cloud delivered with managed hosting on AWS and a support team she trusts by name.
The Challenge: Infrastructure Without Ownership
Molly Connolly has been building custom FileMaker solutions since 1997. Over nearly three decades, she has built Thorsen Consulting into a respected boutique firm serving clients who depend on her systems to run their businesses. Some deployments serve up to 5,000 users. Several operate in regulated industries with HIPAA and SOX requirements. None can afford downtime.
In the early days, clients hosted their own FileMaker servers, but as her client base grew, she moved clients to managed hosting providers. Unfortunately, they all operated from the same level of inadequate service: “Yes, we have the equipment for you, but you’re still the one in charge.”
Providers handed over credentials and stopped there. When something went wrong, the calls still came to Molly. Every time performance suffered, she could only recommend optimizing their FileMaker solution.
Unfortunately, when a client depends on a 10-year-old system, that advice doesn’t solve this week’s problem. Molly needed on-demand processing power and a partner who would come to her with options.
Reactive-only support works for low-stakes systems. It doesn’t work when 5,000 users are online, and the business stops if the server goes dark.
What Thorsen Consulting Needed
Molly’s requirements weren’t unusual, but they were rarely met. She needed proactive server monitoring with daily health checks and a team that would come to her with solutions. She needed the flexibility to accommodate complex, custom implementations and wanted compliance-grade security applied across the board, not just for clients who technically required it.
The Solution: A Fully Managed Cloud Built Around Clients
Proactive Monitoring and Real Support
With Soliant.cloud, Molly stopped being the last line of defense. The team monitors server health proactively. When she does reach out, she reaches people she knows by name who already understand her client environments.
Scalability
Processing power scales quickly, without hardware procurement cycles. Molly no longer needs cumbersome archival workarounds just to manage storage costs. When a client needs more capacity, the team adjusts.
Snapback Backups
The old process meant dialing into a server, manually triggering a backup, and doing it maybe twice a day. Snapback replaces that with continuous, cloud-native snapshots. The default is every 15 minutes, but Molly worked with the team to dial her snapshots back to hourly, a better fit for her workflows.
AWS Workspaces (VDI)
For heavy data processing and large exports, a virtual desktop running inside the same VPC as FileMaker Server makes a noticeable difference. Working close to the data rather than across the open internet is significantly faster.
Flexible Access with Guardrails
Most of Molly’s environments are fully managed. But six highly customized Mirror Sync implementations require direct server access. The Soliant.cloud team worked with her to find a path that preserved both her access and the security posture.
SOC 2 Type II Compliance
Molly needs continuous, audited compliance, not a point-in-time certification. Soliant.cloud’s SOC 2 Type II Compliance ensures consistent security standards across its entire client base, regardless of what any individual client formally requires.
The Differentiator: Service Over Scripts
Most hosting providers look similar on paper. What’s harder to replicate is what happens when a developer needs help immediately.
Bots push questions back. Generic queues assume the obvious hasn’t been checked. Providers outside the FileMaker space often lack the platform context to even understand the problem.
Molly’s experience is different: knowing people by name, getting real context on both sides of the conversation, and being met where she is. That kind of relationship is built over time with a team personally invested in outcomes, not just uptime.
The Results: A Reliable Partner That Keeps Clients Online
Thorsen Consulting has been a Soliant.cloud client for years, and Molly’s clients stay online. Her servers are monitored with backups running. Her compliance posture is solid. Even better, she is no longer the one called when a server goes dark.
She can focus on what she has been doing since 1997: building reliable, well-crafted FileMaker solutions for the businesses that depend on them.
❝I came to you guys to help solve those problems, and you’ve done it.❞
Molly Connolly
Thorsen Consulting
About Thorsen Consulting
Molly Connolly has been building custom FileMaker solutions since 1997. She has built Thorsen Consulting into a respected boutique firm serving clients who depend on her systems to run their businesses. Some deployments serve up to 5,000 users. Several operate in regulated industries with HIPAA and SOX requirements. None can afford downtime.
Today, Molly spends less time coding and more time on client implementation and consulting, a natural evolution for someone at her level of expertise. That shift only became possible once the infrastructure underneath her clients stopped being something she had to manage herself.
About Soliant.cloud
Soliant.cloud delivers cloud-based FileMaker hosting on AWS, managed by a team of AWS- and Claris FileMaker-certified experts. They handle full infrastructure setup, real-time monitoring, and automatic updates. When applications need changes, clients have direct access to FileMaker-certified developers who already know the environment. Soliant.cloud offers end-to-end management from people who understand both the platform and the infrastructure it runs on.
As an AWS Advanced Tier Partner, Soliant.cloud holds recognition across multiple AWS programs, including the AWS Solution Provider Program, AWS Well-Architected Partner Program, and AWS CloudFormation Delivery Program, reflecting our team’s deep expertise and commitment to AWS best practices.
Learn more at soliant.cloud.