The theme of TNC26, Digital Sisu, fits naturally into this context. Sisu — a Finnish concept of perseverance, courage, and determination — captures something essential about our world: the ability to keep going, make tough calls, and stay focused on long-term impact, even when the future may look uncertain. At CSC, this mindset is also reflected in how we design, operate and continuously develop Finland’s national research infrastructure – in other words, Digital Sisu in action.
Lesson 1: build the infrastructure around people and trust
CSC provides a wide range of digital services for higher education institutions, research organizations, and the public sector in Finland. While the scale of infrastructure is significant, the foundation is ultimately human: experts who translate customer needs into functional, reliable services.
Founded in 1971, CSC has grown from a small group of IT specialists into an organization of over 700 professionals with diverse backgrounds. This evolution reflects not only the growth of our services, but also the increasing complexity of the research and education infrastructure landscape.
At the core of this work, trust and security go hand in hand. Security is not treated as a separate layer, but as an integral part of everything we do. Maintaining a high level of trust requires continuous investment in security, but also in collaboration: building networks that enable trust between organizations, users, and data.
CSC serves a broad community of customers in research, education, and the public sector, all with different needs but a shared expectation of reliability, security, and ease of use. Meeting these expectations requires solutions that are both robust and user-friendly.
Identity and access: 20 years of Haka
Identity federation has been a cornerstone of Finland’s research infrastructure. The Haka federation, now over 20 years old, has enabled seamless access to services across organizational boundaries.
In practice, Haka provides federated single sign-on across Finnish higher education and research organizations, enabling users to authenticate with their home organization credentials and access services without separate accounts for each system. Today, it connects all Finnish higher education institutions and several research organizations, supporting access to hundreds of services. Haka’s role also extends beyond Finland. Through eduGAIN, it is connected to an international network of identity federations, enabling secure and seamless access to services beyond national borders.
Its success highlights that identity and access management is not only a technical challenge, but also a matter of trust between institutions. Building and maintaining that trust requires long-term commitment, shared policies, and continuous cooperation.
Lesson 2: think in systems – operating infrastructure at national scale
The Finnish University and Research Network Funet, managed and operated by CSC, connects universities and research institutions across Finland and links them to the broader European and global research network ecosystem. We are also proud of the fact that Funet connected Finland to the Internet as early as 1988, a forward-looking decision that required foresight and a certain amount of sisu, long before the societal impact of the Internet was widely understood.
Since then, CSC has consistently focused on maximizing societal benefit: building services and systems that are efficient, shared, and appropriately scaled. These principles help optimize the use of resources not only within CSC, but across the entire research and education community we serve. The same principles underpin our scientific computing and data services, where efficiency, scalability, and shared access remain central design choices.
At this scale, infrastructure is not a collection of separate components, but a system that supports end-to-end digital services across research and education. As data volumes continue to grow, network capacity alone is not enough. Planning, collaboration, and anticipating future demand are equally critical. Networks should not be seen merely as infrastructure, but as enablers of scientific workflows. The movement of data is just as important as the computation performed on it.
This system-level thinking extends to computing and cloud services. CSC supports a wide spectrum of use cases, from traditional simulation workloads to modern AI applications. Meeting these diverse needs requires a careful balance between flexibility and manageability.
At the same time, the rapid growth of research data has made data management a central concern. CSC provides services for storage, sharing, and digital preservation (DPS), supporting the full data lifecycle. Integrating these services with computing and networks is essential for enabling seamless research workflows.
Engaging with the research community: CSC Ambassadors
Even the most well-designed infrastructure will fall short without continuous interaction with its users. CSC has therefore invested in community engagement, for example through its Scientific Computing Ambassador programme, which brings expertise closer to researchers and research groups.
In practice, the programme builds a network of ambassadors across universities, universities of applied sciences, and research institutes. Acting as local points of contact, ambassadors help their colleagues navigate CSC’s services, lower the threshold for seeking support, and provide direct feedback to CSC. This creates a two-way channel where insights from everyday research workflows can inform service development, training, and support.
This work has reinforced a key lesson: infrastructure is not only built for the community, but together with it. Ongoing dialogue ensures that services evolve in line with real needs. It helps bridge the gap between technological possibilities and practical use.
Lesson 3: build beyond borders – interoperability at the European level
European initiatives such as GÉANT and EOSC demonstrate the importance of interoperability across countries and organizations. Networks, identity federations, and data services must work seamlessly together to enable research that increasingly transcends institutional and national boundaries.
In practice, however, interoperability is not achieved through standards alone. It requires sustained collaboration, alignment of goals, and a willingness to adapt, often across different organizational cultures, priorities, and levels of maturity.
LUMI and the power of European collaboration
Interoperability becomes particularly visible in large-scale collaborations such as LUMI and the broader EuroHPC ecosystem. Hosted by the LUMI consortium and operated by CSC in Finland, EuroHPC Joint Undertaking’s LUMI is one of Europe’s most powerful supercomputers and a joint investment of the EuroHPC JU and a consortium of 11 European countries. It exemplifies how national expertise and shared European ownership can come together to build and operate world-class infrastructure.
Initiatives like LUMI highlight that technical excellence alone is not enough. Success depends on coordination across multiple layers: technical, organizational, and political. It also requires trust and the ability to build shared ownership among partners.
Looking ahead, the importance of this cooperation will only increase. Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing are reshaping infrastructure requirements, while data volumes and transfer speeds continue to grow rapidly. These developments place new demands not only on computing capacity, but also on networks, data management, and identity solutions.
The key lesson is that future infrastructure will not be a single system, but an ecosystem. One that integrates computing, data, networks, and identity into a seamless whole across Europe. Building and sustaining such an ecosystem requires persistence, trust, and a shared sense of direction. In other words, it requires Digital Sisu at a European scale.
