The economic and legal perspectives of cloud computing in Italian public administration and a roadmap to the adoption of g-cloud in Italy

Abstract

Cloud computing has reached a high level of adoption worldwide. In Italy, the adoption of Cloud Computing for the Public Administration is still far from the European and American best practices due to infrastructural, economic, legal and organisational culture reasons. The Italian Public Administration is facing enormous challenges in order to build a long term strategy capable of delivering the benefits required from the government and citizens, evaluating and reducing the potential regulatory, economic and environmental risks. The new emerging paradigm of the Public Administration, that many authors called as ‘‘g-Cloud’’, should be implemented and managed through a common and coherent strategy. Starting from a comparative analysis of the g-Cloud state of the art in Europe and in America, the objective of the paper is to provide a roadmap showing the future steps needed for the adoption of g-Cloud in Italy, by analyzing the main economic and legal perspectives of Cloud Computing for the Italian Government and Public Administration.