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Lauri Lavanti
About Lauri Writing Contact Newsletter FI SV
Lauri Lavanti
About Lauri Writing Contact Newsletter FI SV

Digital inde­pendence and resilience

Lauri Lavanti sitting on a stool leaning against a tall table. He is wearing a black blazer and a blue-and-white floral shirt. In the blazer pocket is a multicoloured pocket square. A staircase in the background.

Finland and Europe must control their own digital infrastructure. That is why I founded the digital independence citizens' initiative, which collected the 50,000 signatures required for parliamentary review in July 2026. With it, we demand that Finland reduce its dependency on foreign digital service providers and strengthen digital sovereignty.

Finnish public administration is heavily dependent on large US cloud providers, so-called hyperscalers — for example Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Since 2022 it has become painfully clear that power politics in geopolitics is here to stay, including in the digital arena. Finnish and European alternatives exist: UpCloud is a concrete example of a high-performance domestic cloud provider that the public sector can use. I advocate for breaking up public IT procurement, preferring open source, and factoring in crisis resilience in procurement decisions.

Digital independence is also about data portability and avoiding lock-in to individual vendors. Public data generated with public money should be portable and stored in a way that outside parties cannot misuse it.