Italtel and Cisco are building a new data center for the Italian Army and modernizing its infrastructure, in a €2.5 million contract from Italy’s Ministry of Defense.

The Italian Army’s network has two main centers in Rome and Padua, to support IT services for all military bases throughout Italy, and obviously has to meet stringent security and continuity standards.

Italtel will install a new data center to run alongside the army’s existing network, which will enable virtualization and concentration, eventually leading to a “functional and cutting edge ICT network”, commissioned by the Telematics and Informatics Advanced Technologies Division of the Italian Ministry of Defense.

"We are proud to be able to provide our skills and ability to the Italian Army,” said Stefano Pileri, Italtel CEO. “Being able to enrich the technological equipment of such a significant customer is a source of pride for us and reconfirms Italtel as an established supplier to the Italian Army.”

This project is just the latest step in a process to modernize the Italian Army’s ICT, which Italtel and Cisco began a few years ago.

The companies first set up two new data centers that simplified the technological infrastructure within the Army, reducing the number of physical servers and simplifying network elements.

Following this, they created eleven ‘mini data centers’, distributed throughout the country, to get the Italian Army’s technology into the cloud. According to a statement from the companies this has strengthened and virtualized applications, while improving network reliability and data security.