Treasury rewarded for a Cloud Infrastructure that will create savings for the Public Administration

Cloud Computing to improve efficiency in the Public Administration: this was the theme of the Treasury Department’s project (Ministry of the Economy and Finance), that won, on 29 November last, the prestigious 2012 G-Cloud Award from the Minister for Public Administration and Simplification, Filippo Patroni Griffi.

The award is organized by the Astrid and Think foundations, together with the Public Administration Forum and The Innovation Group. Four mentions were given (to ISTAT [Italian Statistics Bureau], to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to the Udine municipality, and to the province of Trento), as well as two awards for the best project proposals (the Toscana region and the Treasury Department). The award, as Francesco Castanò, Head of the Treasury’s Departmental IT Coordination Office, and head of the project, highlighted, “was given for the development of a Cloud services platform that could be used by the Ministry of the Economy and Finance and by other government bodies, with the prospect of creating a Domestic Internal Cloud”.

The award attests to the Treasury Department’s will to invest in ICT technology and innovation as instruments to improve efficiency. Cloud Computing is a challenge that the Department decided to take on even before it became one of the pillars of the Digital Agenda strategy. This decision, in time, proved to be rewarding.

The project will allow the Treasury to optimise the management of its own IT infrastructure, to increase the quality of services provided, and also to share this infrastructure with other entities of the public administration that will thus be able to have access to advanced IT systems without the initial investments.