Greater independence for project work, with a European cloud platform hosting applications and research data.
South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences (Xamk) is a Finnish higher education institution combining education with research, development, and innovation (RDI). It works with students and a broad range of stakeholders involved in publicly funded RDI projects, bringing teaching and project work together.
Working with large datasets is part of turning research and development into publicly accessible applications for Xamk. Using European cloud infrastructure to support that work is a point of pride, as RDI Specialist Väinö Toots explains.
“We take pride in the fact that not everything needs to be outsourced to overseas providers, and we can use European alternatives when working with big data.”
Väinö Toots, RDI Specialist at Xamk
The collaboration with UpCloud has been smooth. The team reports that services have remained available, and when an issue arose, the helpdesk responded promptly and helped resolve it.
Xamk’s experience shows how a directly managed cloud environment can support the varied needs of university projects. With UpCloud, the project team can manage its own resources on a European platform and support RDI applications intended to remain publicly accessible long after the projects end.
Xamk uses a single cloud server, storage, and a managed database instance on UpCloud to host applications for different projects.
These applications use databases containing up-to-date information on Finnish companies and global patents. The application using Finnish company data is available at monimuotoisuusmittari.fi. The setup supports the projects’ current requirements while leaving room to increase capacity as their needs develop.
The intended life of these applications extends beyond the projects that create them. Xamk aims to keep these applications accessible to anyone with an internet connection for at least 5 years after the projects end. That makes reliable, continued hosting an important part of the work.
RDI projects bring different requirements to a university’s IT environment. Teams need room to develop applications, work with diverse datasets, and manage resources according to each project’s needs.
For the Xamk project work, the opportunity to administer the cloud environment directly was a key benefit of adopting UpCloud. Working through centrally managed services had involved coordination with the university’s Azure administrators. Managing the UpCloud instance directly reduced that communication overhead.
The shift gave the project team a more independent way to manage its environment, supporting work that does not always fit a standardized, centrally managed service.
