The Ministry of Education and Culture is purchasing digital services for higher education institutions to safeguard the operational preconditions of Finnish research and education

The Ministry of Education and Culture has renewed its agreement with CSC on supplying service packages for educational, scientific, cultural and administrative needs in 2018. The services help to enhance the operational basis of Finnish research and education.

The services, which are provided by CSC, offer interoperable solutions and they are available to all higher education institutions. Higher education institutions can use the services produced and supplied by CSC to support their own research and education and to extend their high-quality digital and international offerings.



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For the first time, state research institutes operating under the auspices of other ministries will also be able to use data management and scientific computing services free of charge. The use of the services set out in the agreement will contribute for full-scale use of CSC's high-performance computing environment, which will be updated between 2017 and 2021 as part of the data management and computing development programme. The purpose of the DL2021 development programme and the services offered under the agreement is to support research and education and to ensure the international competitiveness of Finnish research cooperation in data and computing intensive research.

– The ministry is providing higher education institutions with services that enhance cooperation and improve competitiveness. At the same time, we are also responding to the need to develop competence more extensively against the background of the DL2021 development programme and growing clientele, explains Counsellor of Education Juha Haataja from the Ministry of Education and Culture.

– CSC will report on a quarterly basis to the Ministry of Education and Culture's Department for Higher Education and Science Policy on the qualitative implementation of the services in each sector. At the same time, we are also discussing how to develop the services in the long term in a broad range of different reference groups on the basis of the feedback received from user organizations. The impacts of the general data protection regulation and the accessibility requirements (in Finnish) on service development and production are a key issue this year, says Kirsi Hepolehto, the agreement contact person at CSC.
 

The Ministry of Education and Culture is purchasing five service packages from CSC in 2018:

  • Higher education and research information network Funet
  • Information management and architecture services for higher education institutions
  • Analytics and data infrastructure services for the Ministry of Education and Culture
  • National data infrastructure services for science and culture
  • Data management and computing service package

The content of the service packages and their objectives are set out in the agreement. The agreement is available on CSC's Internet site (in Finnish):

Inquiries:

Juha Haataja
Counsellor of Education, Ministry of Education and Culture
juha.haataja@minedu.fi

Klaus Lindberg,
Director, CSC – IT Center for Science Ltd
klaus.lindberg@csc.fi

 

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