Haaga-Helia

About Haaga-Helia

Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences is a business-oriented university of applied sciences with around 11,000 degree students and four campuses in Helsinki, Porvoo and Vierumäki. Its own IT team runs the systems students and staff use every day. One of them is a Citrix virtual desktop environment that lets students use their course software remotely.

A partnership as old as Cloud2

Haaga-Helia signed with Cloud2 as soon as the company was founded in 2017 and became one of its first customers. Cloud2 was a very small company then. Haaga-Helia trusted it from the start, and the partnership has continued ever since.

Citrix expertise behind the internal team

Cloud2 works on Haaga-Helia’s Citrix environment and the virtualisation layer underneath it, which runs on Citrix Hypervisor and VMware. The team also answers questions about other parts of the infrastructure, such as Active Directory and Azure.

Haaga-Helia’s IT team handles the daily running. Cloud2 is the partner it calls when a problem needs specialist knowledge, and the one that steps in if something goes seriously wrong.

Getting help is simple. Questions go straight to the consultants who know the environment instead of being passed around inside Cloud2. Usually within an hour, Haaga-Helia knows whether Cloud2 has the answer.

Cloud2 also advises on direction. Haaga-Helia makes its own technology decisions, and Cloud2 raises issues early and helps the team get the most out of the choices it makes.

Cloud2 has built disaster recovery capability for Haaga-Helia’s VDI environment using cloud technologies. If the primary environment goes down, students can keep studying.

Haaga-Helia also uses NetScaler to publish and load-balance its critical services. NetScaler distributes traffic across servers and publishes services securely outside the campus network, so they keep running when a server is out of service or demand peaks. Cloud2 supports the NetScaler environment alongside the rest of the Citrix environment.

When everything just works

Students rarely think about any of this. They log in, their software opens, and they carry on with their studies. When teaching moved online during the COVID-19 pandemic, the environment was one of the things that let them keep studying from home. Over the years, tens of thousands of students have used it.

“At Haaga-Helia, success isn’t measured in euros. It’s measured in study days that go exactly as planned. That’s the scorecard we want to be judged by.”

Ahti Kaisalmi, Account Manager, Cloud2

A route into working life

The partnership also works in the other direction. In Cloud2’s early years, most of its junior hires came from Haaga-Helia. Many of them went straight into customer work and have grown into experienced consultants. Cloud2’s people have also given guest lectures to Haaga-Helia students and taken part in the university’s recruitment fairs.

“Through this partnership, young people have been able to start their careers with us. Many of them have stayed and grown into experienced professionals. That is the part I value most.”

Kimmo Hassinen, Chief Operating Officer, Cloud2

Why it has lasted

The scope of the work has stayed much the same over the years, and so has the reason it works. Cloud2 is the right size for Haaga-Helia. The university gets personal service from consultants who know its environment in detail and care about it. Cloud2 will continue to stand behind Haaga-Helia as its environment evolves.

“Our students can focus on learning, and our staff will provide them with future-oriented and sustainable solutions. This can be achieved with Cloud2’s support.”

Virpi Virtanen, ICT Infrastructure Manager, Haaga-Helia

Support for existing Citrix environments in education

Many educational institutions still run Citrix environments that students rely on every day. Cloud2 supports these environments together with the virtualisation and Microsoft infrastructure around them, so studying stays easy for students and the IT team has expert help when it needs it.