Italy's sovereign cloud explained beyond the press releases: data classes, who must migrate what, and the real constraints of a PSN migration.
Italy did something few countries have actually pulled off: it built a sovereign cloud, gave it a legal framework, and moved real workloads onto it. The Polo Strategico Nazionale (PSN, National Strategic Hub) is not a white paper. As of July 2026, more than 280 public administrations have migrated onto its infrastructure, with contracts worth around 3.6 billion euros. I design architectures for a living, and I read migration plans the way a structural engineer reads a renovation permit. The press releases tell you the building is beautiful. They do not tell you where the load-bearing walls are. This article is the version I would give a CIO or an IT director over coffee: what PSN actually is, what the data classification really implies, and where migrations get expensive. For non-Italian readers, consider this a case study in how sovereign cloud works when it leaves the slide deck, the same…