Hamina is home to a Google data center, making Google Cloud the natural choice of cloud provider for the City of Hamina. The organization knew it could connect its systems directly to the data center for ultra-low-latency networking. Analyzing the costs, the City of Hamina calculated that using Google Cloud would lead to an approximately 43% reduction in IT costs across the organization. “When we had the numbers laid out, it was a no-brainer,” says Palmu. “It shifted the question from ‘should we do this?’ to ‘how soon can this happen?’.”

With its migration to Google Cloud underway, the City of Hamina realized it no longer needed expensive computers as it could now rely on the speed and performance of its cloud infrastructure. The City of Hamina schools were already making significant savings with ChromeOS, and school staff reported that the laptops were always ready for use from the moment they opened them. Palmu decided to put ChromeOS to the test.

“We ran a proof of concept and saw the same kind of flexibility and functionality at faster speeds,” Palmu describes. “We didn't need to wait for the computers to update. And when we compared the price per device, we estimated it was more than 50% less than before.”

Before these changes, City of Hamina staff running compute-intensive workloads such as video editing were restricted by the limited availability of devices capable of performing such tasks. Now, with ChromeOS and Google Cloud, all employees have a dedicated device they can use to perform these same tasks, allowing them to complete their work more quickly and efficiently.

Not only is the City of Hamina saving on devices, it’s saving on compute power too. With Google Cloud, the organization can scale up its servers on demand to meet the needs of its workforce then scale them back down afterwards. This means it only pays for the compute power it uses, as opposed to paying to keep servers running constantly as it did before. As a result, the organization can now run 100 servers when required, for the price of running just 30 servers constantly in the old environment. And because those servers are all managed, they no longer require administrative support, reducing the organization’s costs further, in a sequence Palmu describes as “like peeling an onion. The more we challenged the environment, the more we reaped the benefits.”

Being able to scale its compute usage means the City of Hamina can dedicate significant amounts of power to tasks when needed, enabling them to be done far faster than before. With video editing, for example, Palmu recalls that even with very powerful hardware, “editing would take minutes to process, sometimes hours depending on the length of the video. Now we can use Google Cloud to focus as many cores and as much RAM as needed and the processing can be done in a click.”

These performance improvements are being felt across the organization, with the mapping and zoning department the latest to remark on how fast their operations are. “It’s not just that the device is lighter, or that we can scale up the compute power as needed, it is also that the data they’re handling is closer to them too. Having ChromeOS, Google Workspace, and the Google Cloud data center working together contributes to this incredible speed increase,” says Palmu.

Combining ChromeOS, Google Cloud, and Google Workspace has also brought the City of Hamina significant security improvements. With its old environment, when a user accessed the organization’s systems, such as its HR data, that connection was made in the user’s computer, meaning if the computer was compromised, sensitive data was at risk. Now, the City of Hamina has built a solution on Google Cloud, using Kasm Workspaces, to ensure that when a user accesses that data, the connection is made in a single-use virtualized container (machine), which disappears when the task is complete. “It’s a huge improvement in security as there’s never a direct connection,” explains Palmu. “And with Chrome Enterprise, we can have the browsers link to our Google Workspace, making it a seamless experience for the user.”

Similarly, the City of Hamina is now able to provide citizens with secure access to public services in public spaces such as libraries. Previously, when a citizen wanted to pay a bill on a public computer, it was, according to Palmu, “next to impossible to guarantee that those bank credentials wouldn’t get left on the system or stolen using malware.” Now, the City of Hamina uses Google Cloud to enable single-use virtual desktops on each public computer, so every time a user logs in to make a payment or share sensitive data, that desktop is deleted and the data disappears when they log out.