What is the Statistics Finland case study about?

The Statistics Finland case study details how Statistics Finland, the national statistics agency of Finland, uses Hygraph to manage government data with 250 users working in parallel. The project involved replatforming from a legacy homebrew system to Hygraph, enabling flexible, secure, and scalable content management for statistical data, including populations, housing prices, and monetary indicators. Read the full case study at https://hygraph.com/case-studies/statistics-finland.

How many users does Statistics Finland manage with Hygraph?

Statistics Finland manages 250 users simultaneously within Hygraph, each with custom permissions to ensure secure and efficient data handling. https://hygraph.com/case-studies/statistics-finland

What industry does Statistics Finland operate in?

Statistics Finland operates in the government sector, providing statistical data on populations, housing prices, and monetary indicators. https://hygraph.com/case-studies/statistics-finland

How does Statistics Finland manage permissions and user roles in Hygraph?

Statistics Finland uses Hygraph's custom granular permissions to create 45 different permission settings, ensuring that each user has access only to the content relevant to their role. This setup protects data integrity and supports secure collaboration among 250 users. https://hygraph.com/case-studies/statistics-finland

What were the main reasons Statistics Finland chose Hygraph?

Statistics Finland selected Hygraph for its robust security and governance (including GDPR compliance), granular permissions, API-first and frontend-agnostic architecture, and flexible structured content modeling. These features enabled them to modernize workflows, ensure data security, and support multi-channel publishing. https://hygraph.com/case-studies/statistics-finland

How does Statistics Finland use Hygraph in their technical architecture?

Statistics Finland integrates Hygraph with a mix of internal systems, cloud providers, and microservices hosted on Microsoft Azure. Hygraph manages all metadata and relationships, and content is accessed by microservices and distributed across multiple channels. The setup also uses GraphQL Mutations and Webhooks to automate publishing workflows, including SERP indexing, archiving, RSS feeds, and user alerts. https://hygraph.com/case-studies/statistics-finland

What types of content does Statistics Finland manage with Hygraph?

Statistics Finland manages statistical content such as dynamic and static graphs, tables, and key figures. This content is enriched with editorial content and published across multiple platforms using Hygraph's structured content modeling and flexible API. https://hygraph.com/case-studies/statistics-finland

What security and compliance certifications does Hygraph have?

Hygraph is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant (achieved August 3, 2022), ISO 27001 certified for its hosting infrastructure, and GDPR compliant. These certifications demonstrate Hygraph's commitment to providing a secure and compliant platform for sensitive data, including government use cases. https://hygraph.com/features/secure

How does Hygraph ensure data security and governance for government clients?

Hygraph enforces strict data retention, protection, and encryption policies. It provides granular permissions, SSO integrations, audit logs, and regular backups. These features, combined with GDPR and CCPA compliance, ensure robust data governance and security for government and enterprise clients. https://hygraph.com/features/secure

What are the key features of Hygraph used by Statistics Finland?

Key features include GDPR compliance, custom roles and granular permissions, flexible content modeling, a powerful GraphQL API, and support for structured content. These features enable secure, flexible, and scalable management of statistical data. https://hygraph.com/case-studies/statistics-finland

Does Hygraph support structured content and content modeling?

Yes, Hygraph offers flexible content modeling and supports structured content, allowing teams to create reusable content across platforms. The schema editor enables visualization of content relationships, making it easy to manage complex data structures. https://hygraph.com/docs/getting-started/fundamentals/content-modeling

How does Hygraph's API-first approach benefit organizations like Statistics Finland?

Hygraph's API-first, frontend-agnostic architecture allows organizations to build flexible, future-proof tech stacks. Content is served via API, enabling omni-channel publishing and easy integration with various frontend technologies without being tied to a specific framework. https://hygraph.com/case-studies/statistics-finland

How easy is it to onboard a large team to Hygraph?

Hygraph enables rapid onboarding of large teams. For example, Statistics Finland successfully onboarded 250 users in parallel, leveraging custom permissions and an intuitive interface to ensure a smooth transition. https://hygraph.com/case-studies/statistics-finland

What resources are available to help teams get started with Hygraph?

Hygraph provides a structured onboarding process, including introduction calls, account provisioning, business and technical kickoffs, and content schema workshops. Additional resources include extensive documentation, webinars, live streams, how-to videos, and real-time support via chat, email, and Slack. https://hygraph.com/docs

What support options does Hygraph offer after implementation?

Hygraph offers 24/7 support via chat, email, and phone, an Intercom chat for real-time troubleshooting, a community Slack channel, and access to a dedicated Customer Success Manager for enterprise clients. Extensive documentation and training resources are also available. https://hygraph.com/docs

How does Hygraph handle maintenance and upgrades?

Hygraph is a cloud-based platform, so all deployment, updates, and infrastructure maintenance are managed by Hygraph. Customers benefit from seamless upgrades and new features without manual intervention, allowing them to focus on their core business operations. https://hygraph.com/features/secure

How does Hygraph perform for high-traffic or large-scale use cases?

Hygraph is designed for high performance, featuring Smart Edge Cache for faster content delivery, high-performance endpoints, and a robust GraphQL API. These features ensure reliability and speed for large-scale and high-traffic applications. https://hygraph.com/blog/improvements-to-high-performance-endpoint

Is Hygraph easy to use for non-technical users?

Yes, Hygraph is frequently praised for its intuitive user interface, making it accessible for both technical and non-technical users. It was recognized for 'Best Usability' in Summer 2023, and customers report that it is easy to set up and use, even without technical expertise. https://hygraph.com/try-headless-cms

Who can benefit from using Hygraph?

Hygraph is ideal for developers, product managers, and marketing teams in industries such as government, ecommerce, automotive, technology, and more. It is especially suited for organizations needing scalable, secure, and flexible content management across multiple channels. https://hygraph.com/case-studies/statistics-finland

What problems does Hygraph solve for organizations like Statistics Finland?

Hygraph addresses operational inefficiencies, high maintenance costs, integration challenges, and the need for secure, scalable content management. It enables flexible workflows, structured content modeling, and robust security, making it suitable for complex government and enterprise use cases. https://hygraph.com/case-studies/statistics-finland

Where can I find more case studies about Hygraph's use cases?

You can explore additional case studies, including those for Komax, Stobag, Samsung, Dr. Oetker, Discovery, and more, on the Hygraph Case Studies page: https://hygraph.com/case-studies.

What are some key results achieved by organizations using Hygraph?

Organizations using Hygraph have achieved results such as onboarding 250 users in parallel (Statistics Finland), 3X faster time-to-market (Komax), a 20% increase in website monetization (Autoweb), and improved customer engagement (Samsung). See more results at https://hygraph.com/case-studies.

When was this page last updated?

This page wast last updated on 12/12/2025 .

Statistics Finland and Hygraph Case Study

Snapshot

Statistics Finland is the national statistics arm of the Finish government providing its users with the most current information on populations, housing prices, and important monetary indicators. Statistics Finland strives to provide data rich information for national studies and data collection. In order to expedite workflows and upgrade their approach to metadata management to make it more reusable using structured content, the team set out to evaluate their systems. The team had an aggressive timeline to overhaul the entire publication workflow within 3 years until the launch, Statistics Finland chose Hygraph to meet this challenge and serve as the content platform.

Hygraph contains all the metadata and relations of the content. Publishing is controlled within the CMS and synchronized with our other systems, and then accessed through microservices in Azure.

Juhani KauppoProject Manager at Statistics Finland

The Problem

Previously, Statistics Finland had a robust system of publishing solutions that were custom and overlapping solutions and reaching the end of their lifetimes. A key requirement was that the new solution would offer a simple approach to multichannel publishing as well as more support for organizing and querying structured content. The team wanted to bring more transparency to their processes and provide more control of the publishing processes to the content team. Instead of trying to retrofit the existing systems to meet their updated needs, Statistics Finland chose to replatform their system into a portal using Hygraph.

The Process

The Statistics Finland team wanted to ensure that they built a flexible, future proof tech stack. By choosing to build their architecture with SaaS products, Statistics Finland could offload the infrastructure maintenance to the SaaS companies. The team wanted to take advantage of the current best practices when building digital products with SaaS. These best practices included implementing API-first thinking, building a backend that was frontend agnostic, and modeling structured content in graphs.

The API-first thinking empowered the teams to build projects without the restrictions of templates and enabled them to create omni-channel solutions from the beginnings of their project. Building a project that is not tied to specific framework or development flows enables them to choose the solutions that best fit their needs and use case. Building a project that is frontend agnostic helps ensure that the project remains future proof. Adding or updating frontend presentation layers to match the current trends while maintaining an existing backend data set is faster and saves resources.

Statistics Finland wanted to build their project with structured content that enabled greater flexibility. In modeling the content in graphs, they could ensure there were no built in hierarchies and that content was more reusable across the project.

After evaluating several vendors on these criteria, Hygraph quickly emerged as their CMS of choice given their requirements. Hygraph was up to the challenge of onboarding 250+ users to work in parallel with highly optimized workflows was an added advantage for the team.

The Current Setup

The larger architecture consists of a mix of internal systems, cloud providers, and other software interacting with Hygraph. The CMS houses all of their metadata and relationships and is used for managing and creating content, mainly statistical in nature. This content is accessed by microservices hosted on Microsoft Azure, and is supplemented by website specific caching for content coming in from other third-party systems.

This new stack means that the team no longer needs to maintain workflows with older XML-editor types of tooling, a critical component of the older architecture. Building new workflows with automation that take content from the CMS and easily distribute it across multiple channels. Additionally, they use GraphQL Mutations and Webhooks to trigger SERP indexing, archiving, RSS Feeds, and user alerts when new content is published.

The content from Statistics Finland is largely statistical in nature, so much of the content is around the creation of dynamic graphs and tables, static graphs and tables, and publishing of key figures. This is managed via Hygraph and further enriched by editorial content for the pages that house this data.

Why Hygraph?

Statistics Finland chose Hygraph for the following reasons:

Security and Governance

Being a government institution handling sensitive data, security and data governance were key considerations when choosing their CMS. It was critical that the chosen solution was GDPR-compliant and had stringent data policies in place to ensure the integrity of the data was maintained. Hygraph met these standards and has strict policies in place for criteria like data retention, data protection, and encryption, providing a content infrastructure robust enough for government usage.

Granular Permissions

Ensuring that team members had no access to content from other users was a critical consideration when evaluating CMS. Statistics Finland needed to create highly specialized roles within the CMS in order to ensure that the interactions with data were limited within the CMS. The custom permissions that Hygraph offers enabled Statistics Finland to create specific roles for all users. With this feature, Statistics Finland ensured that no information was incorrectly accessed or modified to hamper the integrity of any data.

API-First and Frontend Agnostic

The team wanted to build a stack that was flexible and future proof by relying on technologies that were API-first and Frontend Agnostic. Hygraph is an API-first GraphQL Headless CMS that meets these standards and follows the best practices of these trends. It was essential that all content was served via API, with no restrictions on frontend, tooling, or platform. Working with a content API that gave them a predictable dataset to render across platforms, as well as have the option to change this destination-mix in the future without having to re-platform their CMS met the requirements set out by Statistics Finland.

Structured Content

Structured content offers the ability to create content that is reusable across platforms, even when working with large volumes of statistical data. Data types include field operations, surveys, censuses, etc., all of which were easy to manage with Hygraph. It is an excellent choice for structured content because of its flexibility, powerful GraphQL API, and sleek UI. Using the schema editor teams can easily build highly modular content and visualize the relationships between the models due to the clean UI which matches powerful flexibility with a straightforward API.

Results

Hygraph offered custom granular permissions which protect the integrity of the data and enable users to have exactly the right amount of power within the CMS
Content Modeling within Hygraph is easy to create reusable structured content which can be pushed to multiple platforms
API-first architectures ensure that the team is flexible as their needs grow and change without requiring a large data migration on the backend
250 users were simultaneously onboarded to Hygraph with ease
Hygraph works well within a larger ecosystem of microservices to create a seamless stream of data which can be pushed to multiple channels

Frequently Asked Questions

Statistics Finland & Hygraph Case Study