On November 8, the Ara Pacis’ Auditorium in Rome hosted the closing event of the SUNFISH project (SECUre iNFormatIon SHaring in federated heterogeneous private clouds). The event saw the participation of the Minister of Economy and Finance, Pier Carlo Padoan; of the Chief of the State Police, Franco Gabrielli; of the DAG Department Head, Luigi Ferrara; of the Director of the Agency for Digital Italy (AgID), Antonio Samaritani, and of numerous cloud computing experts from public and private organizations.

The event, moderated by Giancarlo Senatore, partner of PwC - consulting firm member of the SUNFISH consortium - was an opportunity to share the project's main achievements and to discuss secure cloud computing solutions dedicated to public and private sector organizations in Italy and Europe.

The project, which started in January 2016 thanks to the funding of the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation “Horizon 2020”, is the result of the collaboration of eleven organizations, coordinated by the Ministry of Economy and Finance, coming from six different countries (Austria, Estonia, Israel, Malta, United Kingdom and Italy).

The prject result is a secure private clouds integration platform for protected data sharing, verified in the context of three different application scenarios - presented during the event as use cases - with different security requirements.

All cases of use have been concretely realized following the specific needs of the European Public Administrations, in a user centric approach.
The first use case has been the Italian one. In this case, the blockchain technology guaranteed the accuracy, integrity and confidentiality of the information processed in the State Police (PS) information system and communicated to the Ministry of the Interior, Economy and Finance for the calculation of the Police’s staff payroll. 

Together, the Chief of Police, Franco Gabrielli and the MEF’s DAG Department Chief, Luigi Ferrara, have highlighted the commitment of the Italian Public Administration in the process of modernization and rationalization of public spending. As Luigi Ferrara said, the MEF has initiated this process two years before the start of the Sunfish project, with the project of unification of the five DAG Data Centers into a new single center (CED). Ferrara described the Sunfish initiative as follows: "It represents a great opportunity for the rationalization of public IT infrastructures and, hence, of public spending. This way we secure the management of a huge amount of data, which now needs to be systematized. The technology of the Italian case will be used in the "Cloudify NoiPA" project to renew the NoiPA system. This system, which has been classified as one of the intangible infrastructures of the Public Administration IT's three-year Plan and, starting from January 2019, will support the human resource management activities for 3 million public employees".

Pierre Vella, MITA's Program Manager, and Phil Parker, Head of the British South East Regional Cyber ​​Crime Unit, presented and discussed then the second and third use cases, which covered experiences in Malta and in the UK.

Considering the amount of data managed by the respective institutes, both highlighted the benefits of using the platform and the future prospects for its use. Given the importance of the theme of security in information exchange and sharing for the sector, the solution developed by the SUNFISH project is, indeed, applicable to many areas of Public Administration.

The event continued with a panel of 4 national and international cloud computing experts: Francisco Mederiros, European Commission -DG CONNECT, Jay Heyser, Research Vice President of Gartner, Antonio Samaritani, DG of AgID and Tom DeGarmo, Chief Consulting Operation of PwC.

The experts tackled several hot topics on the challenges and opportunities that the new cloud-based and blockchain-based technologies offer, and discussed about the future of public-private collaboration for innovation development.

The event ended with a speech by Pier Carlo Padoan, Minister of Economy and Finance, who used words of great appreciation for the staff of the Ministry and, in general, towards the public sector. The minister identified in the public sector the main actor of the major technological transformation that today, more than ever, can "guide the introduction and push the implementation of new technologies, thus giving a strong signal to the lazier private sector which should start from now to adopt new tools, new technologies and acquire new skills."

According to the Minister, in order to go towards this transformation, it is necessary for the country, for Europe and in general for us all to explore and fully exploit all the opportunities offered by IT sector, for the benefit of both the public and the private sector.

"Technology, as we know, requires a perfect combination of several factors; Time has come for economics and politics to go hand in hand with a single well-defined direction.
The time is ripe, we can now reconsider and test our priorities, one of which is technology. Technological transformation must be reality. "

More details and video of the event will soon be available on:

• www.sunfishproject.eu
• www.cloudifynoipa.it