Nokia and Cinia partner to secure Finland's critical infrastructure with advanced DDoS protection

Objective

Cinia is a Finnish provider of critical connectivity and cybersecurity services, responsible for some of the country's most important digital infrastructure, including international submarine cable systems and backbone networks that underpin the Finnish digital economy. The networks Cinia operates carry traffic for government services, financial systems, emergency communications, and other essential services on which the country depends.

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are designed to overwhelm networks and services by flooding them with malicious traffic from large numbers of distributed sources. When directed at critical national infrastructure, the impact is immediate and far-reaching: outages cascade from the carrier into the public services and financial systems that ride on its connectivity.

Network traffic growth driven by the AI supercycle is making this picture sharper. Traffic is becoming more distributed and dynamic across AI, cloud, edge, and data center environments — increasing both complexity and exposure and pushing network resilience from a separate security function toward an embedded core requirement. Cinia required a DDoS protection capability built for this reality and capable of anchoring a new managed service for its own customers.

Cinia selected Nokia Deepfield Defender as the foundation of a fully managed 24/7 DDoS protection service. The collaboration establishes a managed security service provider (MSSP) model in which Cinia uses Nokia's network-embedded detection and mitigation capabilities to deliver protection to its own customers across Finland.

Deepfield analyzes large volumes of IP traffic across high-capacity networks, using real-time telemetry combined with broader internet context — through Deepfield Genome — to identify abnormal patterns that may indicate an attack. Working with Nokia IP routers, Deepfield Defender delivers AI-driven detection and mitigation directly inside the network: threats are identified and acted on within the infrastructure itself, at scale and in real time, without relying on external scrubbing systems or manual intervention.

Cinia's Network Operation Center (NOC) and Security Operation Center (SOC), with their experience in 24/7 monitoring of critical environments, combine with Nokia's technology to deliver market-leading protection backed by local consultancy and support. Joint development between the two companies enabled effective detection, mitigation, and protection against the latest generation of DDoS threats — including botnet-driven attacks — while preserving service continuity under sustained attack conditions.

The Nokia deployment delivers:

• Network-embedded detection and mitigation of DDoS traffic, applied directly inside the IP infrastructure
• AI-driven, real-time threat identification with agile mitigation orchestration
• Detection and mitigation of large-scale attacks, including botnet DDoS, using automated traffic analytics
• Deep visibility into high-volume network behavior through advanced correlation of IP network and flow telemetry
• Faster anomaly identification and more informed capacity-planning decisions
• A scalable foundation for a fully managed 24/7 DDoS protection service delivered to Cinia's customers

For operators of nationally critical networks, embedded DDoS protection is no longer a discretionary layer. The combination of national resilience requirements, intensifying regulatory focus on critical infrastructure, and the volume and dynamism of AI-driven traffic is pushing security from an external add-on toward a core, in-network capability — and the Cinia deployment shows what this looks like in production at the scale of a country's backbone. The MSSP dimension matters separately. Many countries have operators in a position similar to Cinia's, responsible for nationally critical connectivity and increasingly required to deliver protection to the customers riding their networks. The Cinia model turns DDoS protection from a cost line item into a revenue-generating service, offering a model that translates well to other markets where secure, locally managed digital infrastructure is becoming a national priority.