More flexible resources and new tools for FIONA

At a FIRE webinar on 22 September 2026, Valtteri Valkonen from Statistics Finland presented ongoing work within FIRE to further develop the FIONA remote access system. FIONA is Statistics Finland’s secure remote access environment for analysing sensitive register and survey data.

One of the new solutions presented by Valkonen is the introduction of dynamic computing resources. Instead of allocating a fixed amount of computing resources to a research project at all times, virtual machines can be deployed as needed.

This will allow resources to be allocated more efficiently and enable research projects to access greater computing capacity when needed. A limited rollout is planned to begin in the final quarter of 2026.

A new project view is also under development. It will bring together information such as a project’s data access permissions, users, datasets and FIONA resources in one place. In addition, a model is being piloted in which a large research project can be divided into a main project and subprojects, so that not all users need access to all sensitive datasets.

Work is also underway to make it easier to share research code between FIONA projects. The planned solution is based on a separate code repository and automated security checks. The first pilot phase is scheduled to begin in the final quarter of 2026.

Future development phases will also explore the use of local language models, Python package management, and the development of an interface between FIONA and the metadata catalogue.

The overall aim of FIRE’s development work is to reduce practical barriers to register-based research throughout the research process – from finding datasets and obtaining access permissions to developing researchers’ skills, providing a secure computing environment, and supporting the research itself.