National Strategic Pole (PSN) is a company that aims to equip the Public Administration with cloud technologies and infrastructures capable of ensuring high guarantees of resilience, scalability, interoperability and environmental sustainability. The objective is to safely host the critical and strategic data and services of the Europen Public Administrations (PA), classifying them based on the level of criticality defined by theNational Cybersecurity Agency (ACN) e dal Department for Digital Transformation.
With PSN the intent is to accelerate the digital transformation of the PAleading 75% of Europen administrations to use cloud services by 2026.
Polo Strategico Nazionale talks about the work carried out with the support of Oracle and the objectives already achieved
On the occasion of the Oracle CloudWorld Tour event, held for the first time in Europe, in Milan, on April 21, 2024, Paolo Trevisan – Chief Technology & Information Officer PSN – explained how the work carried out by the National Strategic Pole has already made it possible to achieve truly impressive results.
The journey began several years ago now but the bulk of PSN’s activities have materialized in the last year and a half. An intense period, which today gives us the picture of a reality fromenormous potential, capable of bringing order to the workflows of Europen PAs. The ultimate aim is to make available for PAs acloud services infrastructure adequate, geographically distributed across different locations, to ensure operational continuity and fault tolerance.
Private (purpose) company, which sees the direct participation of subjects such as TIM, Leonardo, Sogei, Cassa Depositi e PrestitiPSN still has significant public participation.
Trevisan explained that the PNRR funds are confirmed as an excellent tool for migrate to the cloud at least 100 Public Administrations (with at least one single service) by September 2024 and by the end of 2026 reach over 280 Public Administrations fully-migrated.
Data center certification and deployment
Polo Strategico Nazionale is the first and currently only organization to have obtained the Qx4 certification by ACN. This is a very important aspect: it means that the cloud solution implemented, adopted and proposed by PSN has exceeded the qualification requirements stricter ones defined by the Agency.
The certification confirms that the infrastructure is capable of guaranteeing a very high level of security, resilience, scalability and interoperability, essential for hosting critical or strategic data and services such as those of the PA. Trevisan talks about Qx4 because the certification issued by ACN includes the QC4the highest level of qualification for cloud services and the QI4compared to cloud infrastructures.
PSN currently uses 4 data center of property divided into two region: allow you to provide services business continuity e disaster recovery high performance and very low latency. Thanks to’RPO (Recovery Point Objective) very low, PAs can benefit from almost uninterrupted operational continuity; on the other hand, a RTO (Recovery Time Objective) equally contained indicates that PAs can expect to be able restore full operation of IT services in extremely short times, which can vary from a few seconds to a few minutes.
Surprise at Oracle CloudWorld: PSN relies on Oracle Alloy for the opening of a new one region. What does it mean
The Oracle technologies play the lion’s share of PSN’s choices, which – as Trevisan confirmed – have made it possible to create a resilient platform, capable of adapting to workload of every single Europen PA. The bouquet of services made available to PAs is called, as a whole, PSN Managed: this is the cloud service managed within the National Strategic Hub which aims to facilitate the digital transformation and modernization of public services.
Alfredo Nulli, Head of Portfolio & Center of Excellence of TIM, presented as the father of the idea of ”PSN Managed”, says that – compared to the reality overseas – European PAs are burdened with a quantifiable “tax” in the order of 20-25% on the use of the same cloud resource . In short, there is one spread of access to technology between the USA and the EU (to the detriment of European realities) that the Old Continent has decided to pay for control your data in sovereignty.
About this, “PSN must contain innovation“, says Nulli. And a demonstration is just the idea of Oracle Alloya platform we will talk about later.
In the early days of PSN, Oracle understood the “winds of change” and presented a unique and innovative offering: Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer (DRCC). A solution that allows companies to have all the public cloud services available Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) in an independent, self-contained cloud region, physically located at the customer.
Right during the keynote opening of Oracle CloudWorld Tour Milan, Trevisan made an important preview announcement. He revealed that PSN will open a region based on Oracle Alloyevolution of the concept of DRCC, considered true “Europen pride” because it was the first ever in Europe.
Migration to the cloud and digitalization using a sovereign cloud platform, in line with regulatory requirements
Nulli underlines the significance of Trevisan’s announcement by observing that no country has yet completed a similar project. Europe is “under observation” in a positive sense: other European realities are trying to understand how our country has managed to equip itself with asovereign cloud infrastructurewhich protects the data stored by the PA.
Pierluigi La Mantia, Area Manager PA of PSN, describes in detail the “acceleration” of the last year and a half, also clarifying that the reality that has been created can provide a cloud platform that fulfills all regulatory requirements. PSN offers services to start or complete the process migration to the cloud (with the digitization and updating of applications) and the infrastructure of private cloud expressed through the 4 data centers mentioned previously.
Through a separation that is physical in some ways and logical in others, it is possible for PAs to find all the technologies provided for example by others on the PSN platform Cloud Service Provider. The difference is that, in the case of PSN, the PA will find one customized solution and fully in line with current regulatory requirements.
The first cloud region of PSN based on Alloy is “Europen pride”
Oracle Alloy is a platform complete cloud infrastructure which allows partners, service providers and system integrators to become providers of customized cloud services. It is based, as we said, on OCI and offers access to a plethora of services IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) e PaaS (Platform as a Service) available in the cloud.
Alloy allows companies to deliver tailor-made cloud services for the specific needs of its customers, allowing greater flexibility and customization. It therefore represents an opportunity to expand your cloud service offering in an efficient and personalized way, exploiting the potential of Oracle’s cloud infrastructure.
In the case of PSN, Alloy makes the company a Cloud Service Provider sovereignwith its offer, personalized compared to the Oracle proposal and strongly focused on the needs of PAs (as we said, moving in full compliance with the regulatory framework).
Trevisan further notes that Oracle Alloy allows you to manage the whole stack in mode managedin a disconnected way compared to the others region managed, with secure and controlled access, to activate a whole series of processes to review the application software before it goes into production (with the possibility of possibly retracing one’s steps, canceling some of the interventions applied) and, above all, it allows the management of particularly important data (up to level 3, i.e. “strategic data“).
In short, the partnership between PSN and Oracle has placed Europe in a position of leadership in Europe: at the moment there are no initiatives that have led to similar results, which were achieved in such an effective way and in a short time.
The look security by design
During his speech, Trevisan wanted to underline several times how the aspect linked to safety is a topic on which PSN pays “spasmodic” attention. All services developed internally and those offered to PAs by PSN are developed with the concept of security by design like the North Star. The focus is on physical, logical and cyber security: the protection offer is in short integrated.
The physical safety concerns the protection of the organization’s tangible assets and physical environments,…