For the national cloud a surge of activity to defend against cyber attacks

More and more administrations are deciding to 'get on board'. As for the business, Emanuele Iannetti - 57 years old, from October 2022 at the helm of the National Strategic Pole (PSN) managed by the project company of the same name owned by Tim (45%), Leonardo (25%), Cdp (20%) and Sogei (10%) and aimed at providing digital infrastructure and cloud services to the public administration, as envisaged by the Pnrr - explains to Il Sole 24 Ore, a peculiarity has emerged in recent times, marking in some ways also the trend that appears most evident for the future: 'Many of our customers have received massive cyber attacks. Skills, procedures, and cutting-edge tools based also on artificial intelligence techniques have allowed us to intervene, preventing the blocking of their institutional sites and preserving their usability'.

What has become clear is that Psn is increasingly fighting for its customers against the cyber threat. Which, Iannetti clarifies, has become progressively more evident: 'In the last two or three months there has been a spike that is not visible to most, but which we manage on a daily basis. And when I say we, I mean above all Leonardo, who is responsible for managing the entire cybersecurity component for Psn through a tool that is Soc: the Security Operations Centre that they have'.

It is also for this reason, for all the activities that the National Strategic Pole is therefore carrying out in terms of cybersecurity, that Iannetti dots the 'i's' when the discussion falls on the subject of possible threats to security and data sovereignty. "The initiative that led, about two and a half years ago, to the establishment of the National Strategic Pole,' explains the CEO of the PSN, who also used to be CEO of Ericsson Italy, 'was created to fill the infrastructural gap, such as the excess of non-certified data centres, and to accompany the Italian public administration in its digitalisation process, as well as to meet the need to guarantee national sovereignty over data, particularly strategic and critical data.

With this in mind, according to Iannetti, it is necessary to consider that 'the production of microchips, transistors and electronic components today cannot be separated from US or Asian manufacturers'. The same reasoning applies to "finished hardware, computational products such as servers, memory or networking, useful for building all cloud architectures" or even "for software. Therefore, today it is not possible to provide infrastructure services without considering the use of US technologies or, in any case, from countries outside the European Union'. On the other hand, 'the most critical domain to observe is data. And it is on this that digital sovereignty is measured'. And in this framework, stresses Iannetti, the National Strategic Pole has been entrusted with 'the realisation of infrastructures and the provision of cloud services that can be made usable both through platforms located in its own four data centres, and through infrastructures, also located in Italy, of Cloud Service Providers such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle'.

Meanwhile, as mentioned, the numbers for the PSN are growing. The goal is to reach 280 migrated administrations with at least 40 per cent of services by June 2026 as per the Pnrr target. "To date, over 470 public administrations have chosen to migrate to the National Strategic Pole cloud. Of these, more than 450 have already started the process of migrating their services to cloud infrastructures, about 320 have migrated at least one service and more than half are fully migrated. More than 130 administrations are related to hospitals and local health authorities: this is also a very relevant figure'. What do these numbers mean in terms of value? "The PSN," concludes Iannetti, "has acquired contracts for about EUR 2.8 billion, targeting in its second year the contractual value of EUR 3 billion envisaged for the entire agreement period, to 2035. At the end of 2025 revenues should be in the order of 300 million