A Series of Fortunate Events

Meet Mika Haapsaari who is working as a Senior Azure Cloud Architect at Nordcloud! Mika is one of our senior pros and his responsibilities include leading one of our Azure teams in Helsinki. Here's his story.

1. Where are you from and how did you end up at Nordcloud?

I’m originally from a small town in Western Finland. After I decided to study IT, I wound up in Tampere, which I still like to call my “spiritual home” - now I’m part of the Nordcloud HQ right here in Helsinki! 

Me ending up at Nordcloud is actually a pretty strange series of fortunate events, which could be a whole separate story on it’s own. I was actually never “supposed to” end up working with the cloud to begin with - I studied networking and software development in college - but, long story short, after meeting the right people almost a decade ago, getting into Azure from the very beginning and then Reeta from our recruitment calling me at a really opportune time, here I am!

2. What is your core competence? On top of that, please also tell about your role and projects shortly.

I like the big picture stuff. Designing the architecture from the ground up on a detailed level alongside with the customer is what I like to think is my strong suit. My role currently is to work as a technical lead for one of our major accounts. Not to forget the getting-your-hands dirty technical stuff as well.

3. What’s your favourite thing technically with public cloud?

This is a tough question actually, there’s so many things to choose from. I love the different options you have for automation, everyone can pick and choose the tools you would like to use for building the automation workflow and it will work just as well as the one next to it. Public cloud in general is a really interesting field because there’s a lot of new stuff coming out all the time. There’s new possibilities every week to do things differently that you necessarily did not know existed the week before!

4. What do you like most about working at Nordcloud?

There could be a lot of things listed here as well, but the #1 thing I would bring up is the level of support you get while working here. In my career I’ve mostly been working as a one-man wolf pack (yes, that’s a timely reference to pop culture) and working with such skilled colleagues is a little new to me. But here, whether you need help with anything, there is always a person ready to help or point you in the right direction.

 5. What do you do outside work?

I read that Paul is building space suits in his spare time, and now I wish I had something as cool to share with you.. 

I love to travel as much as I can. While I'm waiting for my next trip, I like to participate in some social activism. These days I am on the board of my labor union plus I try to be active in a certain political party. Elections are the best! If I want to just de-stress, I play videogames 8-)

8. How would you describe Nordcloud’s culture in 3 words?

Open.

Trusting.

Fun.