The Finnish Social Insurance Institution Kela and Finland’s central election information system recently announced that they were migrating digital services from on-premises hosting in Finland to cloud data centres elsewhere in Europe. Cloud hosting can increase service quality and reliability while also generating cost savings. But extensive government reliance on a small number of cloud providers can raise concerns about systemic risks and technological dependence on foreign-operated infrastructure. How common are different hosting solutions in public sector digital services? We addressed this question by sending Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to Finnish public sector organizations.
We asked Finnish national-level public sector organizations where a sample of 171 citizen-facing online services were hosted. Our queries received 137 valid responses. The responses reveal that hosting is concentrated to a small number of large cloud providers. Amazon Web Services (AWS) alone hosted 45% of the services, making it the largest provider by far. Notably, AWS operates no cloud data centres in Finland. Many Finnish government digital services are therefore likely hosted from neighbouring countries such as Sweden.
Microsoft Azure held the second largest market share, hosting 18% of the Finnish public sector digital services in the sample. Google Cloud held less than 2% of the market. Together these three cloud giants—referred to as hyperscalers—accounted for 64% of the Finnish public-sector hosting market. No Chinese hosting providers were present in the data.
Self-hosting was found to be rare. Only 6% of the services in the sample were hosted by the public sector organization itself. A large part of these self-hosted services was operated by Kela, which has now announced that it is migrating services to the cloud. The rest of the services in the sample (30%) were hosted by smaller providers not directly associated with the public sector organization operating the service. Some of these smaller providers may in fact also rely on the hyperscalers, implying that the true hyperscaler share could be slightly higher.
The services in our sample consist of a broad range of digital public services operated by national-level public-sector organizations for use by citizens and companies. Hosting information was extracted from open-ended responses to our emailed FOI requests and classified into five categories: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Self-hosted, and Other. Requests were submitted between 13-17 May 2025.
In conclusion, we discovered that Finnish public sector digital services were heavily reliant on a small number of large cloud providers headquartered in the United States. In particular, almost half of Finland’s digital public services appeared to rely on AWS, which has no cloud data centres in Finland. This is likely not the result of a coordinated policy decision; instead, each public sector organization has independently chosen to outsource its hosting to the same provider. By law these public sector organizations are also required to have back-up plans and systems in place, which mitigates against risks. However, such deep reliance on a single provider may have unexpected implications for government resilience, since it creates a single point of failure that could result in a more systemic failure in the case of an outage.
This information was collected as part of the GEOCLOUD research project funded by the European Research Commission, by Jaakko Kilpi, Otto Kässi, and Vili Lehdonvirta. A publication based on the results is currently in academic peer review.
Download FOI_Finland.csv
Cover image: Jamillah Knowles & Digit / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/