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ABSTRACT
The digital transformation of the public sector is a crucial objective for the European Commission and member states. Concerns arise due to US and Chinese tech giants’ dominance in cloud computing, impacting sovereignty, privacy, and security. Some European member states established restrictions on non-EU Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) to ensure compliance with European data protection laws. Investigating how states respond to growingly infrastructuralized non-EU public CSPs is crucial. This paper scrutinizes the Italian Cloud Strategy in the context of the public sector’s migration to the cloud. Critical and interpretive policy analysis tools are employed to examine the Strategy’s underlying problematizations and prevailing discourses. The paper argues that while the Italian Strategy recognizes the trade-off between pragmatism and sovereignty, it lacks comprehensive solutions. The unquestioned dominance of non-EU public CSPs, symbolic proposals, and limitations in data classification call for further considerations to strike a balance between pragmatism and safeguarding digital sovereignty.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. In the Public Cloud, the infrastructure is owned by a CSP that, with full control, makes its systems available to users, businesses and government agencies in different geographic areas (or regions) of the world, sharing processing capacity, applications and storage.
2. For the sake of completeness, it is also important to point out that the Department for Digital Transformation (DDT) offers pre-filled templates to different groups of administrations in an attempt to simplify the data classification processes. This is an example of how government actors are increasingly centralizing the cloud migration processes to ensure compliance with relevant regulations and respect the deadlines to access European funds.
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Notes on contributors
Michele Veneziano
Michele Veneziano is a PhD candidate at the department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Bologna, Italy. He investigates the role of public bodies and civil society organizations in the digital transformation of the public sector in Italy and Portugal from a practice-based perspective.