The State Treasury of Finland powers economic subsidy program using OCI
The Finnish government agency migrates claims platform to OCI to meet demand and accelerate crisis payments of more than US$1.2 billion.
“Infrastructure management is a totally different ballgame in Oracle Cloud. Instead of wasting time, we put our energies into speeding up our development. Faster time to market means better service and lower costs.”
Business challenges
After the second wave of the pandemic hit Finland in 2020, the Finnish government tasked the state treasury to roll out a subsidy program for companies facing closure or bankruptcy. The agency was focused on assisting businesses that suffered more than 25% turnover and that were struggling to pay fixed costs, including payroll.
Although the treasury was widely recognized as a frontrunner in cloud adoption, its 15-year-old claims handling system was still running on-premises in a third-party data center. The challenge was to migrate a heavily developed, complex, and hard-to-maintain system to the cloud to help mitigate the looming crisis.
To support businesses more efficiently, the agency needed to move its short-term crisis assistance platform to the cloud. The State Treasury of Finland decided to port the system’s backbone—Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle Database—to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
The thing about using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is that I sleep so much better than when we ran things on-premises.
Why State Treasury of Finland chose Oracle
With years of experience using Oracle technology, and with its Tieto Insurance Application (TIA) platform running on Oracle Database and WebLogic Server, the State Treasury took the logical step of moving the claims handling system to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). The goal was to gain higher performance and meet customer demands faster, and to take advantage of cloud native development for enhancing the TIA platform.
Moreover, a proof of concept demonstrated that OCI would provide faster development capabilities and free the organization from time-consuming administrative tasks, helping it focus on customer-facing improvements and provide better economies of scale to the Finnish government.
The State Treasury of Finland supported the country’s economy with six rounds of subsidies in 24 months, handled on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Results
By moving development of its Tieto Insurance Application (TIA) platform onto OCI with Oracle Enterprise Database Service, the State Treasury of Finland was able to accelerate crisis payments of more than US$1.2 billion to bolster Finnish businesses. Within six weeks, the organization’s DevSecOps teams fused multiple data flows, including nightly batch loads from tax authorities, into the payments platform, relieving thousands of companies in distress in a matter of days.
By running the application in OCI, the treasury gained up to 50% in development speed to meet urgent financial realities and avoid unemployment, economic downturn, and bankruptcy among Finnish businesses. OCI’s scalability also helped the treasury with peaks in demand when the pandemic generated additional waves of subsidy claims by thousands of Finnish companies.
The treasury transformed TIA’s complex structure into a high-performance cloud native application, allowing developers to design, code, test, and deploy without the previous data center impediments.
Shutting down on-premises data centers saved the treasury 30% in total cost of ownership since moving to OCI, representing several hundred thousand dollars annually.
Faster time to market was gained by developing infrastructure entirely in code, running DevSecOps—development, security, and operations—tools in a Continuous Improvement/Continuous Development pipeline. Developers have benefited from cloud native tooling and services that reduce operational tasks and help build applications faster.
Data center security concerns vanished by gaining access to built-in security solutions, including Oracle Advanced Security Transparent Data Encryption—an in-transit encryption capability previously unavailable in on-premises procedures.
Already running certain projects on Microsoft Azure, the State Treasury placed Azure Active Directory on top of OCI to protect customer identities and comply with Finnish government data privacy regulations.
After shifting its main production environment to the Oracle Cloud data center in Stockholm, the State Treasury now operates its disaster recovery in three instances, one of which is another Oracle Availability Domain elsewhere in Europe.
Looking ahead, the situation in Ukraine is likely to require renewed OCI scalability, as Finnish companies, traditionally tied to Russia for business, struggle with blocked imports and exports due to embargoes.
Partners
The State Treasury contracted Oracle Partner Accenture to implement and extend the TIA document and case management system for COVID-19 company subsidy payments. Together, the State Treasury, Oracle, and Accenture shifted TIA from on-premises to OCI.
Although the decision to move to Oracle Cloud was taken in 2020, the switchover happened 12 months later. Due to urgent demands to help companies in distress, the State Treasury could not find a window of opportunity sooner to make the move with minimum downtime. Oracle, Accenture, and the treasury worked as a team over one long holiday weekend to lift the database, application, and associated infrastructure into OCI.
About the customer
The State Treasury of Finland oversees government borrowing, the investment of cash assets, and government debt risk management. It also manages accident compensation payments, as well as citizen loans and interest subsidies.