It was the missing piece.
The one to some extent even more awaited.
The announcement of the imminent opening of the Microsoft’s Italian Cloud Region in fact adds an important element in the framework of the collaboration between the company and our country announced in 2020, in the midst of the pandemic crisis, with the launch of the program Italy ambition.
“1.5 billion investments in five years – he recalled during the presentation of the Cloud Region Vincent EspositoCEO of the company – to intensify the relationship between Microsoft and Italy”.
A complex project, Esposito defines it, which required not only economic investments, but also “a lot of time to create the surrounding conditions and to be prepared for the moment of the opening of the Region”.
Boundary conditions created following five main guidelines, starting from the training and development of digital skills that involved over 3 million people, passing through the digitization of SMEs, which involved, also with specific strategic programmes, the network of partner; for the research of energy efficiency and sustainability; for the utmost attention to the security and data protection criteria necessary for the Public Administration and arriving at accessibility and therefore looking at technology as an enabler of better scenarios.
The Microsoft Cloud Region in the sign of Ambizione Italia
Three years after the launch of Ambizione Italia, here is the announcement of the “first Cloud Region of Microsoft in Italy, one of the largest Cloud Regions in Europe – continues Esposito -. A Cloud Region for Italian companies and for global companies that want to invest in Italy, a catalyst for investment and innovation in the country. A Cloud Region that guarantees customers data security and sovereignty, close to the needs of Made in Italy, developed according to sustainability and energy saving criteria”.
Above all, underlines the managing director, “not a point of arrival, but a starting point to accelerate the paths of innovation”.
The Region will soon open for a small number of partners, which will expand over the summer, and will offer among the first services Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365-
The expectations, from the point of view of the economic and social impact, are very high.
“According to an assessment by IDC, the Cloud Region will attract 10.5 billion investments by 2027 and will create 40,700 jobs in the IT sector alone. And it will foster the growth of an innovation ecosystem that already includes 32 Cloud Region Ready partner companies”.
The economic and social impact of the Region is also underlined by Ralph Haupter, President of Microsoft EMEA, which highlights how within the next four years Microsoft, its partners and cloud customers will generate 135.7 billion in new revenues “and the new region will account for 17.1 percent of new revenues”.
An important multiplier effect also for the ecosystem of the company’s partners. “If today we have already measured a multiplier effect such that for every dollar sold by Microsoft, the partner earns 5.9, we can predict that within the next 4 years it will make 7.54”, continues Haupter. “Innovation is what we all aim for. But innovation requires compute power”.
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Safe, Trusted, sustainable and inclusive: the objectives of the Microsoft Cloud Region in Italy
And it is Matteo Mille, Marketing and Operations Lead Microsoft Italy, who adds a few more details on the Region at the beginning.
A Region that joins the 60 already created by Microsoft around the world and enriches an infrastructure made up of 200 datacenters all interconnected, 175,000 miles of fibre, 190 networks of PoPs (Point of Presence) to which PoPs of Milan and Rome.
“The question to ask is why choose the Microsoft cloud. Perhaps because in recent years we have invested to develop technology within reach of customer needs and to create frameworks for worlds such as retail, finance, manufacturing…”.
“The Cloud region Italy North – he continues – has the confidential computing at the opening. This means that it immediately complies with data sovereignty requirements. We have worked to guarantee security, trust, sustainability and innovation”.
Concretely, as far as security is concerned, Mille underlines how Cloud Azure is in fact the only cloud platform created by a security provider, which analyzes millions and millions of signals every day to prevent any threat or potential disruption in the management of its infrastructure.
As for the Trust, Microsoft talks about Trusted Cloud, emphasizing the ability to manage the data in all phases in which it is accessed, in any process, in compliance with all national regulations.
But it is on sustainability that Mille turns the spotlight: in addition to the commitments already made by Microsoft on this front, for the new Cloud Region it undertakes to use 100% renewable energy by 2025, to reduce water waste by 95% by next year (“for the new Region we are talking about a waste of 0.023 l/kwh”, explains Mille) and the reuse of servers equal to 90%, again within the next year.
And it is on sustainable and inclusive innovation that Microsoft bases its current and future growth: “Microsoft has grown in capitalization because it has always invested in innovation”, is Mille’s comment.
An opportunity for the country
The new Region represents an important signal for a country that suffers from a digitization deficit, as he underlined during the meeting Andrea Rangone, Full Professor at the Milan Polytechnic and President of Digital360recalling Italy’s scarce digital maturity, deriving from scarce investments in ICT innovation (3.29% of GDP against 4.4 and 4.3% of Germany and France) and from our certainly not flattering position in the evaluation of Desi actually translates into an economic and productive disadvantage in the European ranking.
“The pandemic – underlined Rangone – represented a sort of cultural electroshock for Europe and for our country, putting the digital transition at the center of priorities, in parallel with the green one”. As also emerges from the digital investments envisaged by the PNRR.
A digital transition that also has a social value in terms of inclusion and democratization, even involving “segments of the population with reduced abilities” and which therefore represents today an opportunity not to be missed.