New pseudo identifier HId_e will be introduced on 15 December 2025
In the September newsletter we informed about the renewal of the pseudo identifier concerning persons. The new identifier is called HId_e and it will be introduced on 15 December 2025. After this, data with shnro personal identifiers are no longer delivered for remote access use.
The Research Services will replace the identifiers centrally in continuous ready-made datasets similarly as before when renewing other than personal identifiers. The old versions of the datasets will be moved to the “shnro_suojattu” subfolder and the new versions will replace them named the same as before.
Tailored datasets and datasets from outside Statistics Finland as well as researchers’ own work files are still protected by the researchers just as other identifiers were previously. For this purpose, a shnro-HId_e link table is delivered to the folder D:\keys.
All pseudo identifiers must be changed by 30 April 2026. After this, link tables are no longer available.
Alternatives sought for the removal of SAS from FIONA
In February 2025, we informed that SAS will be removed from the available applications in FIONA (excl. microsimulation) on 31 March 2026. As a result, the Research Services have received some requests that SAS would be enabled in FIONA in future as well. Therefore, we aim to enable the use of SAS but as a paid service, at least for the coming years, for those research projects that are already running. The outcome of licence negotiations initiated during autumn will determine on what terms SAS can be offered to research projects in future.
More flexible change of computing capacity according to project needs becoming available
A user interface, with which the research project can initiate and remove computing resources, i.e. parallel virtual machines, independently for the time needed, will be implemented in FIONA in early 2026. This enables more flexible and efficient utilisation of machines than at present. The operating system is Linux Ubuntu. Initially, the user interface can be taken into use for 30 projects and the number will be increased during the year as necessary. Sign your project up to be among the first 30 by email: valtteri.valkonen@stat.fi. The current model for initiation and management of machines will remain available to all projects also in future.
At the same time, the invoicing practices concerning FIONA will be renewed: in future, the costs of computing resources will be based on the duration of use and capacity accumulation. Thus, initiating resources creates costs directly for the research project. In practice, the capacity invoice starts accumulating immediately when the virtual machine is started and stops when the machine is removed.
Windows Server 2025 introduced next year
All Windows machines in FIONA will be updated during 2026 to the new Windows Server 2025 version, because the lifecycle of and support for the current version ends. For users, this means that the Windows look and style will be upgraded to correspond to Windows 11. This change causes an interruption for the research project. More detailed information about the schedules and measures will be announced separately closer to the implementation.
Remote access commitment update request
For some FIONA users, the personal remote access commitment has not been updated for several years. Remote access commitments that have been delivered to the Research Services either on paper before the licensing service was introduced or on an older version of the form before summer 2023 must now be updated due to the renewal of the form.
The remote access commitment has been renewed as remote work has become more common, among other things. For example, the exact address of the place of work no longer needs to be reported. An up-to-date remote access commitment is a prerequisite for using FIONA.
Researchers can update their commitment in the licensing service at https://lupa.stat.fi/. We will send instructions by email later to those users whose commitment needs updating.