Heltti Oy
Occupational health provider, Heltti, has been bringing digital services to tech-savvy knowledge workers across Finland since 2013. But as the company grew, the system behind Heltti’s user experience became harder to manage, putting pressure on the IT team.
“We got to a stage where it was taking all our IT resources just to keep the system running and building new features,” recalls Heltti CTO Henrik Rönnholm. “We wanted to shift focus toward improving the user experience for our customers.”
Enter the team at NordHero. The starting goal was to work with Heltti’s team to reduce operational risk. At the time all of Heltti’s workloads, including customer-facing, were running in a single AWS account. With each new feature, the complexity grew, and the risk of a single point of failure increased.
“They had all their eggs in one basket,” says Pekka Malmirae, NordHero CEO. “So, it was much harder to prevent multiple breakages if the basket is dropped.”
The team’s first move was to redesign Heltti’s cloud setup using a multi-account AWS architecture, which separates production, development, testing, and sandbox environments. The idea was to create safer boundaries, so experiments and updates could be run without affecting live services.
“It’s a bit like moving from one big open-plan office to a building with clearly marked rooms,” explains NordHero Cloud Architect, Harri Eränen. “You can isolate workloads, reduce risk, and grow without the risk of breaking something important when you’re trying out something new.”
Next, the team replaced Heltti’s manual backend processes with infrastructure-as-code, making it faster and easier for the team to make updates and to scale their operations.
As part of this shift, NordHero also introduced serverless components like AWS Step Functions and Lambda, which lowered the internal workload for Heltti’s team while improving performance behind the scenes.
“We didn’t want to change how Heltti worked with their end users,” Malmirae recalls. “We wanted to make sure the backend supported that vision while still giving them plenty of room to grow.”
With Heltti’s new cloud foundations in place, the next step was to design a centralised data lake, which, looking back, was a bit of a milestone for NordHero.
“This was one of the largest data lake implementations we’ve done,” says Malmirae, “both in scale and in how critical the data was for our client.”
For Heltti, the data lake makes it easier to gather information from multiple sources and to spot patterns and improve workflows.
“Now we’ve built the whole pipeline and data platform so it’s ready to grow,” says Rönnholm. “We can extend it later for even better analytics, both for operational needs and for our customers.”
Niklas Granqvist, who worked as NordHero’s Lead Engineer on the Data, explains the approach: “We were building pipelines between information systems. The idea was to bring data together, clean it, and then shape it into useful datasets. So, it’s like creating a single, organised pool where all your data floats until you’re ready to turn it into insights.”
Because Heltti works in healthcare, privacy is non-negotiable. “One of the first things we tackled was anonymising sensitive health data,” Granqvist adds. “We designed the analytics environment to minimise the risk of any identifiable personal information getting through. That way Heltti can gain insights without compromising confidentiality.”
With their new cloud architecture and data platform in place, Heltti’s developers are no longer tied up with legacy systems and can focus on their overarching goal of building better experiences for customers. “It was really, really good in all ways,” says Rönnholm, talking about the collaboration. “The NordHero team was flexible on allocations, it was easy to transition between tasks, and they were fast and efficient throughout.”
And for Heltti, this is just the beginning. “We’ve laid the foundation,” Rönnholm adds. “We are able to scale by growing the team and build even better analytics based on this platform — and NordHero will still be on our journey.”
Thinking about switching to multi-account AWS architecture or designing a data lake of your own? Click here to connect with NordHero team.
