Data sovereignty in focus: how Funidata is preparing for change
How has Funidata prepared for the challenges of data sovereignty? Read about how our expertise, data security measures and the Sisu architecture support our preparedness.
Data sovereignty has become an increasingly important issue as the geopolitical landscape changes. It is increasingly important for organisations to know where their data is located and how dependent their services are on individual technology and cloud service providers.
At Funidata, we have taken a long-term approach to preparing for potential changes related to data sovereignty. This preparation is based on three key factors: strong in-house expertise, distributed backups of higher education institution data, and a vendor-independent technical architecture.
Sisu services are currently hosted on AWS public cloud infrastructure. If, for geopolitical or other reasons, a need were to arise to move away from non-European public cloud infrastructure, Sisu’s core services could be migrated to a hosting environment owned and managed within the EU or EEA with approximately one week of full-time work.
In-house expertise supports independence
One of Funidata’s long-term strategic choices has been to develop and maintain our own technical expertise. Our staff have in-depth knowledge of our products and their architectures, ensuring that we are not dependent on individual external parties for technical expertise or capabilities.
Our staff’s expertise covers a wide range of technologies, tools and platforms. This reduces our reliance on current infrastructure providers and gives us the capability to operate in a variety of technical environments.
Expertise is a strategic development area for Funidata. For example, active cybersecurity training and exercises support our ability to prepare for the challenges of digital sovereignty and respond quickly to changes in the operating environment when necessary.
Data sovereignty is ensured by distributing higher education data
From a data sovereignty perspective, it is essential to ensure the preservation and availability of data owned by higher education institutions, even as the operating environment changes. Sisu data has long been backed up to multiple geographical locations in fully encrypted form.
Data has been backed up to Stockholm and Frankfurt. At the beginning of 2026, our preparedness was further strengthened by also backing up higher education institution data to an environment operated by a European provider in Helsinki.
This ensures that the preservation and availability of data are not dependent on a single provider or platform service.
Furthermore, these backups are protected against modification or deletion by Funidata staff during their active retention period. The source code for our services is also distributed across version control systems to ensure its integrity and availability.
Architecture enables migration between platforms
The technical architecture of Funidata’s services is designed to be vendor- and license-independent. A core principle of our product development is to use open-source tools and solutions as extensively as possible.
Sisu’s core functionalities are not dependent on the current public cloud platform but have been implemented to be platform-independent. This allows us to migrate services to a different operating environment if needed, while maintaining the high level of service our customers require.
Our technological choices, in-house expertise, and distributed data backups form a comprehensive approach that allows us to manage our dependency on any single public cloud provider or hosting platform.
Preparedness evolves with the situation
The operating environment related to digital sovereignty is changing rapidly. We actively monitor discussions and developments and update our preparedness as the situation evolves.
From Funidata’s perspective, the priority is to ensure that higher education data remains accessible and secure, and that Sisu’s core services can be delivered in a different infrastructure if necessary.
Our preparedness is based on three key factors:
- Portability: Sisu’s core services can, if necessary, be migrated in approximately one week to a hosting environment owned and managed within the EU or EEA, or to a domestic hosting environment.
- In-house expertise and independent architecture: Funidata's in-house expertise and Sisu's architecture reduce dependency on any single public cloud provider or hosting platform.
- Data availability: Higher education institution data is backed up across multiple geographical locations so that its availability is not dependent on a single platform service.
