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Italy must invest in Cloud and cybersecurity, under penalty of exclusion of the country’s system from the competitive scenario. If it is Roberto Cingolani about Leonardo who urgently says it, the thesis deserves the utmost attention.
When talking about computer security, we immediately think about privacy. That’s right: GDPR has now entered our culture and cryptographic techniques are making progress. But the technological evolution of services, in this phase driven above all by AI, puts the issue of information availability under the spotlight above all.
If we want to remain competitive as a country system, we must count on digital infrastructures and their enabling elements: the computing capacity of super computers and virtually unlimited memory, as only the Cloud can guarantee. The combination of these elements – even before AI, but now overwhelmingly – allows you to make better decisions faster, ergo to have control over the scope of application. It is a theoretical concept, but it translates into GDP points without too many steps.
For this reason, it is essential that the infrastructures have characteristics dictated by a perimeter of common and national interest: they must be Italian, physically and legally. Instead, we have transferred almost entirely our data storage to foreign, mostly American, platforms. Thanks to their enormous computing capacity, we have given them predictive and decision-making power and an R&D capacity which, also thanks to artificial intelligence, reduces time-to-market and increases return on investment. It is said that it is too late to think about building a national cloud infrastructure. But is it really like that?
Technological lock-in is actually a node. Change has a cost. Creating a national research, development and innovation chain is a strategic choice of industrial policy, of directing public spending priorities. If a large part of the spending on hyperscalers were invested in building proprietary infrastructure, our dependence would greatly decrease. Simply put, with a five-year plan of 15 billion we could finance a highly competitive infrastructure. Then even the private sector will be able to consider an alternative to the global players who today seem to have no rivals.
Diverting those resources – which for us are now items of current expenditure – towards structural investment programs would mean guaranteeing positive effects on the entire production system, including the labor and talent market. In fact, Italy trains excellent specialists and has a good calculation capacity (we are 5th in the world, Cingolani also reminds us): skills that we can further grow through a structured development roadmap, until we reach a good autonomy.
Even the great project of the National Strategic Pole should move away from the perspective that obliges us to resort, always and in any case, to global powers. The PNRR offers us a unique opportunity for long-term construction: let’s use it to truly develop digital Made in Italy.
In the data economy, information bits are a strategic asset for all sectors, even the most traditional ones. The current geopolitical imbalances teach us that it is not far-fetched to resort to national security reasons to justify a provider’s denial of access to data. We cannot rule out sudden price increases either (the similarities with natural energy resources are obvious). In this scenario, whoever accesses basic information has a great weight in determining the final price of a good, be it planes, spaceships, wheat, medicines or beautiful shoes made in Italy.
Roberto Cingolani was right to express himself in front of the Productive Activities Commission: the development and protection of an Italian digital supply chain is also a market issue that concerns a rapidly growing sector and with repercussions on every other production sector, from agriculture to ‘aerospace.
Italy has all the capabilities and resources to decide to play the national game of digital infrastructures, without delegating to the big foreign players: excellent and indispensable, but involved in another championship.
Data is the fuel that transports us towards the future: we must give them a powerful and safe engine, with top-level performance. A roaring engine made in Italy, just like those that the whole world already envies us.
* Michele Zunino, Netalia CEO and President of the Italia Cloud Consortium