Executive summary Executive summary The digital transformation of society, accelerated by the still ongoing pandemic emergency, has made a similar transformation of the Public Administration inevitable. The digitalization of the Public Administration is now a priority objective in order to guarantee citizens and businesses more high-quality, efficient and effective public services, as well as to create new development opportunities for the country’s digital economy. In this transformative process, the use of Cloud Computing, or Cloud, plays a central role due to its enabling features for simplifying and optimizing the management of IT resources, reducing costs, and introducing new digital technologies. For this reason, Italy’s Cloud Strategy was developed with the aim of providing the strategic direction for the implementation and control of Cloud solutions in the Public Administration. Migration to the Cloud allows public administrations to provide digital services and have secure, efficient, and reliable technological infrastructures, in line with the principles of privacy protection and the recommendations of European and national institutions, while maintaining the necessary guarantees for the country’s strategic autonomy, security and national control over data. In this perspective, Italy’s strategy is based on three fundamental pillars. 1. The creation of the National Strategic Hub (NSH), a national infrastructure for the provision of Cloud services, whose management and control are independent from non-EU providers; 2. A qualification process of public Cloud providers and their services to ensure that their characteristics and service levels are in line with the necessary requirements of security, reliability and compliance with relevant regulations and the country’s national interests; 3. The development of a methodology for the classification of data and services managed by public administrations to allow their migration towards the most appropriate Cloud solution (NSH or qualified public Cloud). 3