When Working and Working Well Are Two Very Different Things
With more than ten users sharing a system that Windows 8.1 would only permit ten simultaneous connections to, daily collisions were routine. Performance was inconsistent. For employees in the office the experience was patchy but manageable. For those working from home on mobile or fixed wireless connections, it was genuinely punishing. Processing a single invoice (the application checking availability, updating stock, calculating pricing and tax across each line item) involves hundreds of small data exchanges between the client software and the database server. On a good fibre connection, those conversations happen in seconds. On a weak mobile connection, it could take ten to twenty minutes to complete a single transaction. Staff were routinely working late to finish tasks that should have taken an hour, then getting up at early to go back to the office.
Underneath all of this sat a quieter risk. A workstation-grade machine running an unsupported operating system, in an industrial area, holding the company’s core business data. Backups existed. But the machine itself was a vulnerability on multiple levels.
Private Cloud Migration: From Ageing Workstation to Enterprise Infrastructure
Si Futures migrated the Omni server to the Si Futures Private Cloud, moving it off ageing workstation hardware and onto enterprise NVMe storage. The architecture used FortiGate firewalls at both ends to create a direct, encrypted connection between the client’s office network and the hosting environment. Office users connect to the cloud-hosted server exactly as they connected to the one that was on-site. No VPN client to manage. No manual steps at startup. The application simply works, and faster.
The migration itself took three hours. What made that possible was a week of preparation beforehand: the virtual machine provisioned, network routing configured, the encrypted tunnel tested, and Omni’s own technical team brought in to help extract the complete configuration from the old instance. Users, reports, views, databases, companies, settings — everything extracted from the original and imported cleanly into the new server. This was not a lift-and-shift migration. Omni was reinstalled fresh on the new infrastructure and rebuilt correctly, rather than carrying forward any of the accumulated inconsistencies from a machine that had been running on borrowed time.
A Separate Problem Needed a Separate Solution
For home users with poor connections, a separate problem needed a separate solution. The Omni thin client works by sending constant small exchanges back and forth between the application and the database. On a weak connection, that communication pattern becomes the bottleneck — the volume of individual conversations, not the size of any single one. RDP changes the equation entirely: processing happens on the server, and only the screen image reaches the user’s device. Employees on mobile connections were given RDP accounts with appropriate access, and what had taken three to four hours now takes twenty minutes.
The bottleneck in remote working is rarely the speed of the connection. It is the architecture of the conversation between the application and its data.
What the Team Noticed First
Office users noticed on their first morning back that Omni was faster. They had not been told anything had changed the night before. Users working from home knew immediately. The response from the team was that it felt like a completely different system. One user described it as amazing. Another said it was faster than it had ever been even in the office.
More Than Speed: A Business Continuity Transformation
The business continuity position also changed. The application that the company depends on is no longer sitting on a Windows 8.1 machine that could fail, be physically stolen, or be compromised through a known vulnerability. It is hosted in a managed environment, backed up properly, and accessible from anywhere without the performance compromises that used to define remote working for this team.
Three hours of migration. Years of accumulated limitation, removed.
What Would Three Hours Change for Your Business?
If your business depends on an application running on ageing hardware, an unsupported operating system, or infrastructure that has grown around itself rather than been designed — it may be worth understanding what a properly hosted environment would change. Not just for performance, but for the people who depend on it every day.
Speak to Si Futures about your infrastructure or explore our private cloud hosting options to find out what three hours could change for your team.
