Greenergy Data Centers and NIIS are Laying the Foundations for a Sustainable Digital Future

November 16, 2022

by Justin Petrone

With its singsong vowels, Hüüru, Estonia, is not exactly a name one forgets. Still, it became even more notable in recent years when Greenergy Data Centers decided to build its facility there. The opening of the facility has dovetailed with other efforts to make digital solutions sustainable by software providers such as the Tallinn-based Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions.

Greenergy Data Center (GDC), which advertises itself as the most energy-efficient and secure data centre in the Baltics, built its facility in Hüüru village outside of Tallinn, setting it apart from other centres in the region. “There’s a big difference if the servers are kept in an office building, in a retrofitted warehouse, or designated data centre,” said Uko Urb, GDC’s marketing manager. 

GDC, which commenced operations in February, is the brainchild of Kert Evert, who left behind a career in telecommunications in the mid-2010s to pursue the idea of building a modern data centre in Estonia.

With support from Finnish and Estonian investors, they eventually raised enough private equity to start constructing the facility. They identified Hüüru as ideal, given its proximity to a major power substation and transport nodes and its secure perch upon a limestone embankment.

Optimising energy use …

Sustainability has been at the core of GDC’s vision from the beginning, and the new data centre is equipped not only to be carbon neutral but also carbon negative, as energy from its operations could be used to heat its own facility as, potentially, adjacent properties. 

According to Urb, GDC has optimised its energy usage thanks to the placement of more than 3,000 infrastructure and environmental sensors throughout the centre. It also has an AI-powered cooling system, meaning that the temperature of the 14,500-square-meter facility is managed by AI, which is constantly gathering and employing data to predict where and how to best distribute cooling capabilities. This allows the data centre to limit energy use to only what is necessary. Urb said that GDC is among the first in Europe to deploy such a cooling approach.

… and reusing server heat

GDC also reuses excess heat, Urb noted. “As the IT equipment in the data centre running our e-societies turns electricity into heat, the excess heat should be put to good use,” he commented. “The data centre building and equipment are heated with this same residual energy.”

Given this heat source, GDC plans to distribute the excess heat to a district heating company with the potential to heat thousands of homes. Urb said that GDC already has the technical capability to dispatch heat from its site. Negotiations with potential recipients are ongoing. 

Plots near the data centre, such as residential and industrial buildings built to harness such energy, would make ideal users, Urb reckoned. He noted that the first full house of servers at the Greenergy Data Centers facility could ideally issue 6 megawatts of heat. “This would be enough to heat one hundred apartment buildings or approximately 5,000 households,” Urb predicted.

The footprint of e-Estonia

GDC’s clients are currently domestic and international companies from diverse fields, including IT, finance, cloud service providers, telecommunications, and the like. Urb declined to name any. “For many companies, the location of their server rooms is a secret,” he said.

The facility’s plans for 2023 include producing sustainable electricity on-site. Urb said that GDC is examining scenarios featuring solar panels and geothermal energy. “This will further decrease the ecological footprint of hosting data in our facility and the overall footprint of e-Estonia,” said Urb. He added that GDC is interested in building similar facilities in Central and Eastern Europe. 

A wakeup call

Like GDC, the Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions involves Estonian and Finnish players. Ville Sirviö, a Helsinki-based entrepreneur with a background in digital transformation and e-commerce, has been CEO of NIIS since 2017. The nonprofit oversees the development of X-Road, the backbone of Estonia’s ecosystem of digital services, as well as other cross-border solutions for government infrastructure. NIIS currently maintains a head office in Tallinn, but its development team is actually based in Tampere, Sirviö said. Iceland is another member of NIIS. 

When Estonia joined the Digital Public Good Alliance earlier this year, an international initiative focused on achieving sustainable development goals, Sirviö said it was a “wake-up call” for NIIS to double down on its efforts around sustainability, which has always been a core value at NIIS.

He added that x-Road’s users are also increasingly global, which means that NIIS is responsible for making its solutions environmentally friendly. “When it’s deployed around the world, X-Road has a really strong social impact, as it’s a building block for many societies,” Sirviö remarked. “We want to find ways to limit any negative environmental impact,” he said.

Carbon neutral by 2030

In January, Sirviö, who studied leading sustainable organisations at the University of Oxford, outlined his vision for a sustainable NIIS in an article. In it, he said that NIIS’ primary goal is to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030. It also aims to reduce X-Road’s environmental impact, making it the “most sustainable data exchange” by the end of the decade.

Achieving this will involve moving toward renewable energy within NIIS, throughout its activities, including rethinking how it carries out travelling, procurement, and consumption. Making X-Road more sustainable will ideally involve reducing the use of energy-consuming hardware necessary to run the platform by running X-Road in a cloud environment, for instance.

A dozen diesel trains

But this will be hard work, he said. According to Sirviö, NIIS recently partnered with the Stockholm Environment Institute, a nonprofit research and policy organisation, to assess the carbon emissions produced by its Estonia-based security servers. SEI determined that the amount of emissions generated by X-Road’s security server in Estonia annually equalled the energy expended by a dozen diesel trains travelling between Tallinn and Tapa, a town in central Estonia.

These kinds of assessments are ongoing, Sirviö said, and NIIS is also interested in developing tools for providers of X-Road-based ecosystems that could be used to best configure their setups to reduce emissions. In particular, emissions are linked to sources of electricity and whether or not it is green or fossil fuel-based, he said. That could be an issue beyond the Nordics, especially “We must remember that X-Road is used globally,” said Sirviö. “We have to take into account that X-Road will be deployed anywhere. As software developers, we have to remember that.”

Resouce: e-estonia

The carbon footprint of Estonian digital public services

November 16, 2022

by Peeter Vihma

The Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communication and the Estonian Information System Authority (RIA) commissioned an analysis of the environmental impact of digitalisation on the Estonian public sector. Since Estonia is the global leader in the field with 99% of the public services available online, this study offers valuable insights into the topic. According to the lead author Raivo Ruusalepp, a consultant from Ernst & Young, recommendations based on the analysis could also benefit other countries.

The emerging concern of ICT’s environmental impact

Estonia – like the European Union – sees digitalisation and the adoption of ICT solutions as the important tools for creating greener solutions. But while doing so, the tools themselves must be environmentally sustainable. A recent study indicates that the electricity consumption of the ICT sector currently forms around 5-9% of the world’s total consumption and over 2-4% of total emissions. This is 2-3,5 thousand million tonnes of CO2 annually. Considering the trends towards more digitalisation, this is problematic. More so, given that the environmental impact of ICT is an emerging concern, clear best practices in terms of countries’ approaches and methods in assessing these practices are not available yet.

“Due to the complexity of the IT sector, the measurement of the environmental impact is almost a wicked problem itself,” admits Raivo Ruusalepp, the report’s lead author. “We are using widely used life-cycle analysis, but we are merely contributing to the ongoing effort of addressing an increasingly burning problem that many bright minds are tackling as we speak.”

Mr Ruusalepp points out that there are considerable discrepancies between different measurement methods. To begin with, while middle-of-the-road scenarios indicate a doubling of energy demand by the ICT sector during the next decade, other scenarios claim that the world could simply run out of energy capacity before achieving ITC expansion. This has already happened in Singapore, where, in 2020, the city stopped licensing new data centres because they were already consuming almost 10% of the city’s energy. New data centres would have made meeting the Paris Climate Agreement goals impossible. Also, a widely acknowledged study by Geological Survey of Finland shows that there might not be enough precious metals on planet Earth to satisfy the growing demand for green energy.

Life-cycle analysis of the Estonian digital state

Analysis conducted in Estonia shows that the total impact of the workstation equipment life cycle of all Estonian state agencies is 26,000 t CO2e, which is generated throughout the use period of a piece of equipment (4-6 years). This is slightly more than 1% of the total emissions of Estonia, equivalent to the annual environmental impact of around 5,000 households or the use of 5,555 diesel cars.

To give a sense of the scale of the sector, the survey shows, for example, that Estonian public servants are using slightly more than 10 000 laptops. The survey also lists other equipment, such as servers, printers, and monitors. However, public servants also use a wide array of minuscule equipment.

“The smaller are the gadgets, the less their impact is monitored,” says Mr Ruusalepp. “For example, flash drives, cameras or ID card readers which we rarely pay attention to, actually amount to a lot of waste”

The environmental footprint of the equipment is the largest in production, forming approximately 75% of the total footprint of a piece of equipment. The impact of on-site use and disposal of equipment forms around 25% of the device’s total footprint. For instance, the use of a Dell Latitude 5420 laptop over four years generates around 72-96 kgCO2e while emissions from manufacturing a computer emit 309 kgCO2e.

As computers are produced and often re-used outside Estonia, the local environmental impact is mainly due to the electricity consumption of the equipment. Since the carbon footprint of Estonian energy production is great (89% of Estonia’s total emissions currently originate from the energy sector), this increases the environmental footprint of ICT equipment used by around two times the manufacturers’ reference values.

Cloud services offer the biggest potential for savings

In Estonia, the government uses the Estonian Government Cloud (Riigipilv) for IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS opportunities (Infrastructure, Platform and Software as a Service).  Unsurprisingly, the analysis pointed out that eliminating in-house servers as well as server rooms and relying on cloud services via data centres offers the biggest potential for cutting emissions. Consolidating servers into locations is up to six times more efficient! While data centres are still big emitters, they are also the most environmentally conscious. Among other sustainability indicators, data centres of the Estonian government use ISO 50001 energy management certification. Also, consolidating serves into data rooms allows using innovative solutions, such as heating homes with excess heat.

According to Kaidi-Kerli Kärner, Strategic Planning Director at the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications, already before the analysis, the Estonian public sector was determined to increase the use of Government Cloud.

„The analysis confirms that we have been moving in the right direction by increasing reliance on Government Cloud in everyday activities. Since its opening in 2021, we are also consolidating data centres Under the National Information and Communication Technology Centre, or „IT house” as we call it,” says Ms Kärner. “This is all to achieve the goal we have stated in Estonia’s Digital Agenda: Estonia will be the greenest digital country in the world by 2030.

Universal recommendations

The report’s authors make 9 recommendations for decreasing the carbon footprint of the digital state. These recommendations have universal value and hence are worth listing here in full.

1. Consolidation of servers and server rooms to data centres and promoting the environmental performance of data centres
2. Development of a financing model supporting green ICT choices, especially in using green procurement standards for purchasing new equipment
3. Increasing the environmental awareness and competence of the ICT field, from increasing the motivation for the public sector to become green evangelists to mundane things such as awareness of digital trash, prudent use of equipment, avoiding printing etc.
4. Development and implementation of environmental footprint measuring methods, especially in data centres
5. Extending the life cycle of ICT equipment
6. Removing obstacles related to the use of cloud services, including outdated legal restrictions
7. Widespread deployment of cloud services
8. Implementation of green practices in software development, including modular architecture, e.g. solutions based on microservices and adhering to minimum viable product principles for reducing power usage
9. Promoting cleaning up digital trash

Read the full analysis.

Resouce: e-estonia

SK Annual Conference 2022: Smart-ID, sustainability, and the digi-future

November 7, 2022

by Blessing Oyetunde

Congratulations are in order for SK ID Solutions as the company celebrates 5 years of the Smart-ID. Did you know that the Smart-ID was initially meant to be called Cross-ID? This was revealed at the 13th SK Annual Conference which took place last week Thursday, 3rd of November 2022 with +350 registered participants online and at the Apollo Cinema in Ülemiste Centre, Tallinn.

As per SK ID Solutions’ tradition, the annual conference was to take a look at SK ID Solutions’ digital adventures during the passing year, the current state of the eID world, and the future of digital identification and smart identity solutions. However, this year’s conference was even more special because it was the 5th year of the Smart-ID’s existence. 

In just five years, the Smart-ID has become an integral part of the digital society infrastructure of not just Estonia but also other nations. For instance, if you are one of the Smart-ID’s over 600K users in Estonia, 1M users in Latvia, or 1.5M in Lithuania, you probably cannot remember or imagine a time without this solution for accessing numerous public and private sector digital environments, authenticating transactions, and appending digital signatures. 

Learning resilience through comedy

The conference was kick-started with opening words by Liisa Lukin, SK ID Solutions’ COO, and Kalev Pihl, the CEO, who warmly welcomed the participants and gave a brief overview of the agenda for the day. Following this, Stuart Goldsmith took the stage reconciling ‘Comedy and Resilience.’

The typical e-Estonian might readily think of digital resilience and Estonia’s adept ability to bounce back better and stronger from crises like the 2007 cyber attacks on Estonia. However, comedian Stuart showed how resilience could be applied to everything, from stand-up comedy to our personal and professional lives. And yes, he was funny!

Concluding his session, he said, “resilience is learnable. It’s learned best through times of struggle. When the going gets tough, that’s when you roll up your sleeves and say ‘this is an opportunity to cultivate my resilience.’ That’s when you get it right.” This came after he explained how he handled some of the most difficult situations he has faced since his career as a comedian.

Towards a greener planet

Following Stuart’s session, Kalev provided insight into SK ID Solutions’ ecological footprint. It was great to see the steps SK ID Solutions is taking towards environmental sustainability, as well as to know their digital solutions’ impact on the planet. One of the somewhat bold takeaways, as he called it, of his presentation was that a physical visit to an office for any transaction that could have been carried out online is equal to thousands of authentications and digital signatures. He then implored everyone with access to the eID tool to “use it and help save the planet.”

Goda Raibyte, a Science Journalist, and Mairita Lūse an Environmental Activist and Councillor in the Riga City Council, Latvia, individually took the stage to educate on “Sustainability Delusion: Why Do We Need Critical Thinking?” and “What is Greenwashing and How to Avoid It.” Truly insightful were their sessions. 

A major takeaway from their sessions is that people need to learn to discern facts and what’s genuine from sensationalistic information and reports, propaganda, and greenwashed marketing endeavours. They concluded that sustainability is a product of actual action – individual, collective and systemic action – but that systemic action would always have the most impact.

5 years of the Smart-ID

It is hard picking a particular moment as the highlight of the conference because all the sessions retained the initial momentum. However, the panel discussing the last five years of the Smart-ID and its future, with Aivo Kalu, Urmo Keskel, Mart Oruaas, Andres Kütt, and Kalevi Tammistu as members of the panel and Jaan Murumets as moderator, was delightful. 

It seems just yesterday that the Information System Authority (RIA) announced that they had signed a contract with SK ID Solutions to adopt the Smart-ID for state e-services. Since then, the tool has become widely adopted by the Baltic states and enterprise clients like LHV, Swedbank, Funderbeam, and Monestro. During the panel, it was also revealed that the tool is already in the adoption and pre-adoption phases for countries such as India, Iceland and Barbados. 

Likewise, they noted that the solution will be upgraded and see the addition of some new features because, well, ‘good better best never let it rest.’ According to the panel, we can expect more from SK ID Solutions and the Smart-ID in the coming years. Among other things, they also discussed the European digital identity wallet  as well as possible challenges and opportunities that exist within this framework. 

SK: the here and now and the future

During the final session, Piruza Harutjunjan, SK ID Solutions’ Head of Business Services took us down memory lane of SK’s growth, accomplishments, and breakthroughs over the last couple of years with an emphasis on Smart-ID’s. It was revealed that the Smart-ID won a joint 5-6th place as a favourite brand in Estonia in 2022. Even more deserving of accolades was the fact that the Mobile-ID and Smart-ID have both served users well about 99% of the time with the less than 1% being times of outages due to maintenance and upgrades.

Piruza also discussed the numerous opportunities that exist for SK within and beyond Europe and the plans to seize them. Following this, Liisa Lukin, Kalev Pihl, and Stuart Goldsmith recapped the events and highlights of the day.

Recouce: e-estonia

How do we protect electronic identity in the digital age?

November 4, 2022

by Erika Piirmets

One of my favourite topics to discuss in my briefings is electronic identity (eID). And for a particular reason – eID is one of the foundations Estonia laid for the digital services in the early 2000s. From declaring the taxes and registering a business to applying for a benefit or i-Voting, all are tied to the strongest form of authentication, proving it’s the Erika I say it is behind the transactions.

How often does identity theft occur with all public services accessible using the eID in Estonia?

99% of Estonia’s population has a digital identity, which is provided through a mandatory national document. In October 2022, the 20th anniversary of Estonia’s electronic identity and digital signature was celebrated. It might be surprising to learn that throughout the two decades, no identity theft has been reported as the result of the decryption of the technology behind providing digital identity to people. The only instances related to the misuse of one’s electronic identity have occurred when people have voluntarily given access to their private keys to someone else. Ironically, eID abuse has been carried out by relatives and friends.

The weakest link in the use of technology is rarely the unprotected backdoors but almost always the end-user. For example, you could install the strongest locks available on your door to keep yourself safe, but if you rush to open the door whenever someone knocks, then not even the burglar-proof locks prevent you from being robbed. To have high cyber security processes in place is a must, of course, but to prevent (digital) identity theft, you need to educate the user.

• Don’t write your PIN codes on a sticky note and keep it with your ID card
• Don’t use 1234 as your PIN code
• Don’t give your PIN codes to anyone else, even if asked

These suggestions always provoke laughter from my audience because they seem so… simple. But simplicity is the key. There is no magic in it, but just common sense. This is what Estonia’s government has always raised awareness about, sharing easily understandable actions anyone can take to stay safe in cyber space.

Are you cyber-savvy?

Security is not a topic you solve once and then check off your to-do list. It is an ongoing process, which is why the Information System Authority is constantly monitoring the activity in Estonia’s cyberspace and launched a webpage with study materials to help raise awareness in the information society and prevent people or businesses from becoming victims of cybercrime. “Ole IT-vaatlik”, roughly translated into “Be IT-aware” continuous campaign, pays attention to all the possible risks lurking around the digital world, shares tips on maintaining high cyber hygiene, and also offers a cyber audit environment to test user’s cyber-savviness.

Digital is not necessarily safe by default, but it is transparent

Estonia was on the receiving end of the first large-scale cyber attack against a government in 2007, and one of the takeaways from it was the understanding that, even though it was the first time, it would not be the last. The world currently witnesses Russian aggression in Ukraine, also in a hybrid form. Estonia has shown constant support towards Ukraine since February, including sharing the lessons learned from our own experience with cyber-attacks. This aid did not go unnoticed by the aggressor and according to CERT-EE (Computer Emergency Response Team), 2nd and 3rd quarters of this year showed a significant increase in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against Estonia’s public authorities and private sector companies.

If the usual count of attempted attacks is around 10 per month, then August hit the roof with 65, and September rose to 31. The most significant wave of attacks happened in the last days of August, when over 27 entities were targeted.

But cyberspace monitoring revealed that not only institutions but also individuals were targeted. A massive amount of people were addressed with scam mail, seemingly from the Police; some of the e-mails held a forged court convocation attached. The motive for phishing or ransomware attacks is to retrieve sensitive information, extort money or disrupt users’ trust while engaging in transactions or services in the electronic environment.

Again, the recommendations from the Information Systems Authority seem pretty common sense:

• If you doubt the authenticity of the mail, call the official authority for confirmation
• Don’t open attachments nor reply to the sender
• Don’t click on suspicious links, as they may transfer you to phishing sites
• Delete the e-mail from your account

Finally, being and staying safe in cyberspace depends mainly on the individual’s actions, and all threats cannot be fully eliminated. But thanks to digital systems and monitoring mechanisms, we can find out what is happening and then warn the end-users of the potential risk.

Cyber battle – a new form of Olympic Games virtually

Estonians have always been firm believers in education and its positive effect. Raising digital competencies also began by including ICT education at the primary level already in the mid-90s. So, no wonder that providing cyber security-related knowledge is also the focus among the youth today.

The third year of Cyber Battle of Estonia was hosted by CTF Tech, where young people aged 15-24 from all over the country teamed up to test their skills in solving real-life cyber security challenges. From eliminating malware from the city government’s server or enabling the paralysed city street lightning system to support a traffic control tower after they suffered an attack encrypting all data. These are the tasks the youth teams are battling over to train themselves to be resilient for future scenarios where many of them will be in charge of the security of public or private processes. 

Speakers’ Corner is an article series where the e-Estonia Digital Transformation advisers talk about the digital society and their personal experiences related to using public e-services. 

Resouce: e-estonia