(versione italiana qua)
In an increasingly digital society, the basic infrastructure for communication, data sharing and exchange is taking on ever greater strategic importance. In many industrialized countries, the digital infrastructure operating in sectors of central public interest is provided and controlled by the state. This became quite evident during the recent public health emergency. In France, for example, the government activated a dedicated service for its employees' video conferencing needs, hosted on state-owned servers, to better protect the confidentiality of communications. It did the same for the school sector.
In Italy, the GARR consortium was established to provide a high-performance network for teachers, researchers and students at Italian universities and research institutions. Over recent years it has developed deep expertise in designing and deploying cloud technology solutions that can be managed efficiently and effectively, thanks to the high degree of automation that only well-engineered computing makes possible. This allows them to create and manage virtual servers in a highly staff-efficient manner. In addition, a service called DaaS (Deployment as a Service) has been introduced, enabling those without systems administration skills or knowledge of virtualisation techniques to create instances of useful collaborative working applications on the same cloud platform, chosen from a catalogue. For instance, in just a few steps one can activate a personal instance of Moodle (an open source e-learning environment) and then manage it independently.
ISTAT and the Italian Statistical Society use this infrastructure to run the Statistics Olympiad. During the lockdown period, cloud services were made available to schools through this infrastructure to support remote learning via the website iorestoacasa.work. All of these services are based on open source software, with the attendant guarantees regarding security and data handling.
The platform's technological architecture is federated, meaning that resource availability can be extended in a modular fashion: institutions wishing to support the initiative can contribute by creating their own cloud region with a number of servers, which are automatically integrated into the federation and managed as a unified whole. This could serve as the foundation on which to develop services for Italian institutions — starting with those historically and culturally closest to the consortium: universities, research bodies, and schools.
Building such an infrastructure for the school and university sectors would allow organisations in the academic and educational world to own and manage a platform under their own control for all remote collaborative work and teaching activities, rather than being obliged to rely on commercial solutions. On these virtual cloud machines, open source applications can be installed for video conferencing (comparable to proprietary offerings such as Zoom or Skype), e-learning (comparable to MS Teams), file storage and sharing (comparable to Dropbox), office productivity (comparable to Google Docs), and video distribution (comparable to YouTube) — with greater control over privacy and content on the part of the operator, and without being subject to the policy and jurisdictional choices of third parties.
For guidance on open source applications to install in place of the better-known proprietary solutions mentioned above, one can consult this site, or this one, or indeed this other one.
A public community that does not develop and control its own infrastructure for managing and exchanging data and expertise will pay an enormous price in terms of its ability to choose its own direction of development, growing ever more dependent on systems and knowledge that do not belong to it, and subject to the surveillance of those who control the infrastructure it uses.
It should also be borne in mind that building infrastructure "in-house," rather than procuring it as services "on the market," means creating an asset that not only remains available beyond the end of the amortisation period, but also supports the growth and dissemination of technical expertise that is invaluable for the development of the Italian economy, which will rely increasingly on the digital sector. This produces a multiplier effect of enormous importance, in which experiences and services not only benefit the user community but also increase the value of the infrastructure itself. The alternative — procuring the same services as current expenditure — generates only increased consumption with no effect on local economic growth.
What GARR has achieved so far is an initial demonstration that this approach can work. Making it available to the full potential range of stakeholders will obviously require equipping GARR with adequate material resources (hardware, power, cooling, maintenance) and human resources (technical staff, administrative staff, managers), to be secured in addition to the consortium's current budget. The involvement of both the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Universities and Research, as the reference institutions for these sectors, will also be necessary.
A preliminary quantitative estimate for the school sector alone puts the cost at approximately €3.5 million per year — €2 million for hardware and operations and €1.5 million for staffing (around 30 positions for systems management of the infrastructure) — on the assumption of providing around 300,000 classrooms with 40GB of storage space each, served by an overall pool of approximately 30,000 virtual machines. In the 2016–17 academic year, Italy had approximately 331,000 classrooms. Greater capacity can be provided at proportionally higher cost. Comparable estimates will need to be made for the university sector.
In terms of organisational model, consideration must be given to the need to provide interested users with access to people capable of managing the applications installed in the cloud according to the organisation's needs. Creating a virtual machine and installing the necessary apps is only the first step, and is handled by the systems staff identified above. Managing this "environment" and supporting the organisation in developing its use requires competencies that are essential for the effectiveness of the technological infrastructure but are not easily available — particularly in the school sector. However, they can be found fairly readily for the GARR solution, which is based entirely on open source software, given that Italy has a large community of professionals and companies with expertise in this area. What would be needed here is a standard service catalogue, which could be drawn up in agreement with sector associations and to which CINI (the National Inter-University Consortium for Informatics) could contribute scientific support. The funding to pay for such services should be the subject of additional, dedicated allocations within the country's digital transformation investment programmes.
The full development of this infrastructure would likely be achievable with around one hundred million euros. In recent weeks there has been much discussion of the European funds expected to arrive to revive the Italian economy — roughly one hundred billion (not million!) euros. What better opportunity, then, to build solutions that free our country from the overwhelming dominance of big tech (now under scrutiny from American policymakers too) and spread knowledge that is extraordinarily valuable for our future development?
--The original version (in italian) has been published by "Key4Biz" on 19 October 2020.
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