Sasky Achieves Faster Rollouts, Future-Ready Scalability with Extreme

The SASKY Municipal Education and Training Consortium (Sasky) provides vocational education to approximately 7,000 students across 12 campuses in Southern Finland. Ensuring equal access to digital learning resources across such a geographically distributed environment required a network that could scale easily — something Sasky’s legacy wireless infrastructure could no longer support.

As access point counts grew and hardware reached end of life, expanding the existing controller-based network became increasingly complex and expensive. Dead zones impacted the student experience, while provisioning new locations could take months of manual work for IT.

A distributed digital campus requires a network that can scale effortlessly, leaving Sasky faced with end-of-life hardware and costly controller-based Wi-Fi expansions. For this reason, Sasky decided to migrate to ExtremeCloud IQ.

By migrating to ExtremeCloud IQ, Sasky adopted a modern, cloud-managed wireless network designed for flexibility and long-term growth. The IT team completed most of the migration remotely over the summer break, dramatically reducing deployment time and disruption. Thanks to simplified licensing and an open architecture, Sasky avoided vendor lock-in and gained the freedom to integrate existing infrastructure components such as RADIUS servers.

"In the past, it would have taken us months just to get the right networks to a location. I think the management likes that we can now spin up a new school in a couple of days rather than half a year", said Miika Syrjä, IT System Analyst at Sasky.

The IT team was able to perform almost all infrastructure changes directly from their desks, with only the physical swapping of the access points requiring on-site visits.

A major part of that flexibility came down to the commercial and architectural approach. Complex licensing models with previous solutions had been a bottleneck during large-scale network designs. With Extreme, Syrjä said, that wasn't the case.

"We pretty much got everything we needed with only one or two license types, so we didn't have to choose features beforehand,” said Syrjä. “It helped with the design immensely because we weren't locked into specific features."

The open ecosystem meant Sasky avoided vendor lock-in. Whether it was integrating different RADIUS servers for access control or linking up other systems, it became easy to add existing parts of the infrastructure to the Extreme network.

With simplified licensing and an open ecosystem, Sasky avoided vendor lock-in and gained the flexibility to integrate existing infrastructure components such as RADIUS servers. The result is an automated, zero-touch network that supports rapid campus expansion and modern learning environments.

Today, Sasky operates a highly automated, zero-touch network that allows IT to spin up new campuses quickly and confidently. The network supports bandwidth-intensive and latency-sensitive applications — including VR, robotics, and IoT — while delivering the operational efficiency and reliability required to support modern, phenomenon-based learning.