Cybersecurity professor Tapio Frantti from the University of Jyväskylä has highlighted significant risks associated with Finland's governmental service portal, suomi.fi, which relies on the American company Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its cloud services. This dependency means that if suomi.fi becomes unavailable, access to essential governmental services and information can be severely restricted. The portal is crucial as it handles governmental correspondence and registry data, indicating what information authorities have on individuals.

There are no alternative login methods for accessing governmental services without suomi.fi, which means that its downtime could revert users to the pre-digital identification era. In such a scenario, individuals would have to rely on traditional methods of interacting with governmental bodies, such as paper submissions or in-person visits, significantly hindering efficiency and accessibility. For example, last year, Finland's social insurance institution Kela's online service, Omakela, received 47.1 million visits, compared to a mere 0.5 million visits to service points and two million phone calls, demonstrating a clear preference for digital services.

This reliance on a single platform poses a critical question for Finnish authorities regarding their contingency planning in case of outages. The absence of backup systems for logging into such a pivotal service not only threatens service accessibility but also raises concerns about the broader implications for Finland’s digital infrastructure and citizen engagement in governmental processes. It underlines the necessity for robust cybersecurity measures and alternative solutions to ensure uninterrupted access to essential public services.