Eesti Loto is Estonia’s only lottery operator, with approximately 400,000 people playing its games every year. In addition to the joy of playing, every lottery ticket purchased supports important areas of Estonian society, as part of the gambling tax is directed to funding culture, sports, education, and other public benefits. Over the years, this has helped support major cultural landmarks such as the Estonian National Museum and Kumu, as well as numerous scholarships.
Eesti Loto’s goal is to provide people with a safe and reliable gaming experience based on the principles of responsible gaming. The company is currently undergoing its biggest changes in recent years — for example, it is replacing its central sales and customer management system. Alongside this, it is especially important that the existing infrastructure continues to operate without disruption.
From network services administrator to strategic partner
The cooperation between Eesti Loto and Elisa began years ago with network services management and has since expanded into broader infrastructure management. “At the moment, the core of our business systems is hosted on our own physical devices, which are fully managed by Elisa,” says Andrus Leevik, Head of the IT Operations Team at Eesti Loto.
Elisa manages Eesti Loto’s network, physical servers, disk arrays, and other core infrastructure services. In addition, Elisa’s internet connection and SMS gateway service are used for sending notifications and marketing messages.
An external partner makes it possible to focus on what matters
Eesti Loto’s infrastructure has remained stable over time. In recent years, aging servers and network devices have been replaced, office server hosting has been shut down, and several other technical changes have been implemented — all in cooperation with Elisa.
Implementing changes and resolving issues requires smooth cooperation across specialists in different fields, and according to Andrus, it is very important that in day-to-day work they are able to treat Elisa’s engineers as members of their own team.
“We understand that, on the one hand, our relationship is defined by formal cooperation agreements, while on the other hand we expect the partner to act professionally and do their best without every last detail having to be explicitly prescribed,” Andrus explains.
“We trust Elisa and have reached a situation where we no longer have to think about the health of the infrastructure on a daily basis — that is our partner’s responsibility. And we can focus on the things that are directly necessary for our business.”
Eesti Loto uses Elisa’s IT infrastructure management service, which includes network and server management, backup solutions management, and management of the VMware virtualization environment.