Google’s data center in Hamina could improve public data security in Finland

Public services are a common target for distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS). The most recent such attack against Finland’s public services was reported in mid-August. The attack targeted the Suomi.fi authentication service and prevented users from logging into the services of the Police, Tax Administration, Kela, Population Register Centre and OmaKanta e-prescription database.

After such attacks, officials commonly defend themselves by stating that the latest and most efficient data protection methods are costly and the defender is always the underdog in the race to maintain data security.

To date, public and health care services have avoided cloud services such as those offered by Google, because they have wanted to keep the data inside the borders of Finland, among other things. Thanks to the new data center in Hamina, these services now have one more reason to migrate to Google’s secure and modern cloud services.

“Google Cloud Platform is affordable and has built-in data security features, so it’s not a matter of cost any more”, says Qvik’s expert in data security and Google’s cloud services, Jerry Jalava. Unlike other cloud services, Google’s services are secure by default, and their data transfers are encrypted.

“When your website is built on Google’s cloud services, you will not have to worry about things like DDoS attacks”, Jalava says. “Public online services are a common target for DDoS attacks. The easiest way to guard against such attacks would be to use Google’s cloud services.”

No service provider is able to offer a 100-percent guarantee against attack, but the data security solutions and default features of Google’s cloud services provide reliable security.