Italy’s Interior Ministry Assures Electoral Data Collection with CA Technologies Solutions

CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY

CUSTOMER PROFILEOrganization: Italy’s Interior Ministry –Department for Internal and Territorial AffairsSector: Public administrationEmployees: 1,000-plus

BUSINESSThe Department for Internal and Territorial Affairs (DAIT) is the division of the Interior Ministry responsible for collecting and disseminating electoral information.

CHALLENGEIn order to improve service delivery and guarantee reliability and security, DAIT needed to refresh different components of its IT infrastructure.

SOLUTIONDAIT adopted CA Technologies Identity Suite, as well as CA Application Performance Management and CA API Management.

BENEFITThe new IT infrastructure ensures high levels of performance and security in collecting and disseminating electoral data, as well as operational cost savings.

2 | CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: ITALY’S INTERIOR MINISTRY

The Department for Internal and Territorial Affairs (DAIT) is the division of the Interior Ministry responsible, among other things, for collecting and disseminating electoral information for elections and referenda governed by national legislation. These include: parliamentary elections, European elections, regional elections (in the absence of regional legislation) and municipal elections (in the ordinary statute regions), as well as repealing and constitutional referenda.

DAIT collects electoral data from sources spread throughout the country (103 prefectures and 8,000 municipalities), processes the data and makes it available to citizens, the press and a host of other institutions.

At different stages of the elections, the data collected includes updated records on the number of voters and sections, lists, candidates, election graphics, voter turnout and, fi nally, results once votes are counted.

The vote is probably the most precious piece of ‘data’ for the life of any democracy. The IT infrastructure used to manage it may, therefore, be considered ‘mission-critical’ and must be able to sustain the signifi cant peaks in workload that occur when deadlines approach for the submission of lists and while ballots are being counted. Just like any government agency, DAIT needs to update its IT solutions and bring them up to speed with technological progress, thus ensuring a better service. One of the main innovations that have recently been put in place is the ability to collect electoral data directly from municipalities, as well as from prefectures; this allows the department to improve the granularity of data collected, separating the individual sections.

To carry out its electoral data collection activities, DAIT had already set up a dedicated IT infrastructure based mainly on products of major companies, together with some ad-hoc tools. The increase in the number of users due to the addition of the municipalities, made it essential to improve several features of this solution.

“The fi rst objective we set ourselves was to provide municipalities and prefectures with a strong authentication solution that was reliable and convenient to use,” says Salvatore Galatioto, Application Development Offi cer for the Department for Internal and Territorial Affairs’ (DAIT) information systems offi ce. “At the same time, we also wanted to improve our ability to monitor the performance levels of applications and avoid access problems for users, such as those that arose before the recent referendum on oil drilling. We also wanted to change our method of disseminating the electoral data, by switching from ‘web services’ to API’s, and achieve all of this with rational, easy-to-manage solutions, so as to quickly resolve any problems and reduce costs as well.”

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BusinessThe heart of the Italian electoral machine

“ We needed a reliable and user friendly strong authentication solution.”Salvatore GalatiotoApplication Development Officer at DAIT’s Information Systems Department of the Interior Ministry

ChallengeTo ensure timely and secure collection of electoral data

3 | CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: ITALY’S INTERIOR MINISTRY

To achieve these objectives, DAIT’s IS team set up a project to renew its IT infrastructure in three phases. The fi rst phase, which went ahead in 2014, aimed to select and implement a strong authentication solution and a tool to monitor the performance levels of applications. After weighing up the alternatives that the market had to offer, the team selected two CA Technologies products: CA Advanced Authentication and CA Application Performance Management.

“CA Advanced Authentication is a strong authentication solution that is best-suited to our requirements as it allows simple and fl exible provisioning. What impressed us was the fact that certifi cates can be installed so easily on a workstation, without a municipal employee having to carry out checks using their mobile phones,” explains Galatioto. “CA Application Performance Management also lends itself nicely to our needs as it lets us easily, intuitively, accurately and reliably identify any application bottlenecks that may jeopardize the performance of the data collection infrastructure and access to it by the municipalities. As it is critical to minimize any downtime or malfunction of the ‘electoral machine’, the CA Application Performance Management solution enables us to very quickly fi nd out which component is not performing optimally, among other things, so we can fi x it quickly.”

Subsequently, and also as a result of the information obtained using CA Application Performance Management, DAIT started to lay the foundations for the second project phase; its origin was closely linked to the measures put in place to cope with pre-election access diffi culties. During this period, CA Technologies proved to DAIT that it had the skills and passion needed to resolve the problem and that it was also well-placed to defi ne the needs of a possible solution.

“CA Technologies engineers were dedicated and available around the clock to help us unlock the system after each access block, providing us with a service that complies with our expectations, and is better than the service offered by other IT providers,” says Galatioto.

Analysis demonstrated the need to reduce the complexity of the architecture and the diversity of the technology used, and to clearly separate the application layer from the security layer. To streamline the solution, DAIT decided to replace the entire security platform with CA Technologies Identity Suite, including (in addition to CA Advanced Authentication) CA Single Sign-On, CA Directory, CA Identity Manager and CA Identity Governance.

“CA Technologies Identity Suite is much more fl exible and so is more adaptable to our requirements. It also ensures better decoupling between the different parts of the infrastructure and easier management of any faults,” explains Galatioto.

DAIT then set up the third phase of its technological refresh process, this time looking at the procedures used to ‘expose’ its services to different external parties, with the gradual transition from ‘web services’ to API management. The department again assessed different market offerings before choosing CA API Management. In Galatioto’s view, the solution ensures ease of use in defi ning and implementing access policies, while also offering the ability in the future to export APIs to a portal developed by DAIT, and make them available to municipalities, other departments and other agencies. CA API Management also integrates seamlessly with the CA Technologies security platform.

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SolutionRationalized architecture based on CA Technologies solutions

“ The new infrastructure has also allowed us to reduce our total IT costs.”Salvatore GalatiotoApplication Development Officer at DAIT’s Information Systems Department of the Interior Ministry

4 | CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: ITALY’S INTERIOR MINISTRY ca.com

Benefi tAn easier to manage solution and fewer access issues

“ CA Technologies has proven to be a reliable partner.”Salvatore GalatiotoApplication Development Officer at DAIT’s Information Systems Department of the Interior Ministry

With the fi rst phase of the project already in the distant past, the second phase began early 2016 and was successfully completed with a go live in July 2016. After a test period, the new operating environment was prepared in about ten days.

“The new security platform, based on CA Technologies solutions, has already been put to the test during the last six-monthly review of voters and sections, and the users (all 8,000 Italian municipalities) have had no problems with identity and access management. With no access denied, our phones are no longer ringing off the hook,” says Galatioto.

He continues, “The new infrastructure has also enabled us to make savings because it has freed up some of the virtual servers and, as it is easier to manage, it also means that we are more autonomous from the technical support service of IT providers.”

Galatioto is defi nitely satisfi ed, commenting, “The set-up problems we had experienced in the past made us wary of potential complications, but with CA Technologies it went without any hitch whatsoever. The transition caused no disruption nor any major changes for users. CA Technologies also took care of integration with the remaining components of the old solution (the portal and application server) without any problem.”

Thanks to CA Application Performance Management, DAIT can continue to monitor the performance levels of the data collection application. In addition, using CA API Management, the department is now in a position to start offering all those who exchange electoral data with the Interior Ministry the opportunity to write standardized applications.

By adopting CA Technologies solutions, the Interior Ministry is able to:

• Ensure that polls are properly conducted

• Optimize the use of its IT resources

• Enable IT renewal projects.

“CA Technologies, with its products and services, has proven to be a reliable partner in the modernization of our IT solutions, which underpin the holding of elections in Italy,” concludes Galatioto.

5 | CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: ITALY’S INTERIOR MINISTRY

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