The future of hybrid working: the drive of the PA to the cloud

For years, the Public Administration has been talking about smart working: the Municipality of Cagliari started its path towards this goal already in 2018, with 200 employees enabled to work remotely. A choice that turned out to be far-sighted and that has allowed us to maintain a very high level of productivity and efficiency over time.

The hybrid working method adopted by the Municipality of Cagliari was made possible thanks to the migration path of the data center to the cloud undertaken by the Administration with the aim of simplifying a complex application situation. The result is an information system capable of satisfying all needs and integrating horizontal and vertical applications: from the document system to applications for taxes, financial sector, heritage, municipal police, sanctions.
Today most of the activities are transferred to the Cloud, which has assumed a strategic role: the adoption of solutions - Agid certified - delivered in SaaS mode, allows the IT team of the local PA to save time for managing the systems, being able to dedicate it to value added activities.

In 2019, together with Lutech, a POC was created for 20 employees, with the construction of a virtual desktop infrastructure on AWS, based on the Amazon WorkSpaces service, which made it possible to guarantee high levels of security even using personal devices of employees as clients, thanks to the characteristics of Amazon WorkSpaces and to an adequate design of the networking component (VPC, VPN site-to-site, etc).

When in March 2020, during the lockdown, it became necessary to extend the POC to hundreds of users, the IT team of the Municipality of Cagliari, on the strength of the positive experience, focused decisively on the cloud. In a short time, hundreds of machines were deployed (400 in a week), using employees' PCs or tablets and providing Internet access to those who did not have it with mobile radio systems. People were able to work from home safely and efficiently.

In this way, the Municipality of Cagliari has been the protagonist of a technological leap that allows 800 of the 1400 employees to work remotely. The future goal is to implement a real paradigm change to enable smart working, which takes into account the achievement of objectives, thus focusing on productivity: the premise is the creation of a process mapping, on the basis of which to assign the objectives and any incentives.