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Our ability to oversee the digital transformation will determine Italy’s future international positioning: it is a key factor of competitiveness, for the sustainability of our development model and the training of the next generations.
In this crucial step, a fundamental role belongs to the Cloud, the only model capable of guaranteeing that storage, calculation, interconnection and interoperability, safety and protection capacity that the world no longer wants or can do without. The quantity and quality of data, together with the ability to process it quickly and well, are in fact distinctive skills that define the ability to make good decisions. This applies to private organizations, but also to public services and sovereign states.
It is no coincidence, in fact, that today the PNRR also fully recognizes migration to the Cloud as a keystone and enabling factor for the effectiveness and efficiency of the Public Administration, which aims to start a new, fruitful relationship with citizens and businesses. The National Strategic Hub is an opportunity for the evolution and development of the Cloud as an enabling element, in which Italy can express important champions. The ACN qualifications envisaged by the Cloud Italy Strategy and recently implemented are the main tool for determining the quality of Infrastructures, Platforms and Cloud Services. Netalia has obtained the highest level qualifications, which allow the Netalia Cloud Platform to process all PA data, including those classified as strategic, i.e. the most delicate and protected.
As happens with physical and virtual infrastructures (energy, highways or telecommunications), it is essential that the country and those who operate within the scope and in the national interest have full sovereignty and control over access to the tangible and intangible assets that determine the our ability to grow and compete. Italian Cloud providers capable of providing advanced, secure and high added value solutions therefore claim the role of strategic system infrastructure, supporting transformation in every area: economic, technological, organisational, regulatory, cultural and ecological.
On the contrary, delegating the management of Cloud infrastructures entirely to global hyperscalers, renouncing the affirmation of a digital Made in Italy in the name of a supposedly unbridgeable technological gap, is a decision that at first glance may seem devoid of alternatives, but which penalizes from the point of view of industrial policy and talent management. Furthermore, it makes us lose control over the most important and strategic asset: our data and the ability to process it. The alternative must be sought and built. The reasoning on the exquisitely strategic role of infrastructures does not include the physical Data Centers built and under construction in our country, pure real estate structures intended to host the “brains” of the large global platforms, thus expanding rather than reducing our dependence on large foreign operators and reducing the autonomy formally pursued by the National Cybersecurity Strategy.
The construction of a national Public Cloud (a multi-client model, scalable on request and billable on consumption, in which the provider directly takes care of maintenance and infrastructure updates ed.). it is the way forward as a driving force for innovation and competitiveness for the private and public sectors. Qualified operators could work with a model of virtuous collaboration, to enhance the unique capabilities of each and reduce areas of direct competition to a minimum: towards the construction of a national champion that profitably concentrates investments and technologies, skills and research & development.
* To Netalia