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 function without disruption.
From network services administrator to strategic partner
Cooperation between Eesti Loto and Elisa began years ago with the management of network services and has since grown 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 IT Operations 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 relay service are used to deliver 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 closed down, and several other technical changes have been made — all in cooperation with Elisa.
Implementing changes and resolving issues requires smooth cooperation between specialists across different fields, and according to Andrus, it is therefore very important that in day-to-day work they can regard 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 our partner to act professionally and do their best without needing every last detail to be spelled out,” Andrus explains.
“We trust Elisa and have reached a point where we no longer need to think daily about the health of our infrastructure — 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 administration, backup solution management, and VMware virtualization environment management.