Gruppo Maggioli reimagines public administration with Google Cloud

If you want to get the latest news on city-sponsored events, apply for a building permit, or pay for a parking ticket in Italy, you will likely interact with Gruppo Maggioli. The 100-year-old, family-managed company provides software solutions to more than 5,000 Italian municipalities, as well as other organizations.

In recent years, the company expanded operations through acquisitions in Latin America and across Europe. Today, Gruppo Maggioli’s software division is known for its website and mobile app platforms that bring higher quality, reliability, speed, and transparency to public administration.

Better services for citizens and businesses

Gruppo Maggioli began exploring cloud technologies to unlock the power of SaaS business models and more seamless infrastructure management. The company ultimately chose Google Cloud to support its digital transformation.

“We standardized on Google Cloud for its high reliability, scalability, and performance to ensure that we could modernize scalable public administration applications and infrastructure,” said Robert Ridolfi, director, IT Service and Technologies Business Unit, Gruppo Maggioli.

The company worked with Injenia, a Google Cloud partner that Gruppo Maggioli purchased in 2021, to help accomplish its cloud migration goals. Injenia has Google Cloud specializations for application development, work transformation, and machine learning (ML).

Injenia experts trained Gruppo Maggioli’s IT staff and helped transform application architecture from monolithic to microservices using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

“We implemented continuous integration and automation using GKE Autopilot mode to flexibly and efficiently manage our resources while accelerating deployments and our time to market for new features,” said Franco Cucchi, software security specialist and cloud architect, Gruppo Maggioli. “We also see greater collaboration between our product engineering team and platform engineering team.”

Gruppo Maggioli integrated Cloud SQL to manage its databases. In addition, the company’s teams use Filestore as a fully managed, low-latency NFS solution for its applications running in GKE. As its needs for additional Google Cloud products evolve, the IT team makes purchases through Google Cloud Marketplace to save time in procurement with the convenience and visibility of unified billing.

Cloud security and data sovereignty

Gruppo Maggioli deployed Cloud Armor to bolster its security posture through ML-based capabilities trained on its applications to provide adaptive protection against attacks on applications and websites. The IT team is also testing use of Security Command Center and Chronicle Security Operations for threat detection, investigation, and response.

Data governance was a key factor in Gruppo Maggioli’s selection of Google Cloud given GDPR requirements and additional local data regulations across Europe. Google Cloud’s robust global meshed network of data centers, including 11 European regions and more than 30 edge Points of Presence (POPs) spanning Europe, supports compliance requirements that require data residency while providing fast performance.

“Google Cloud’s POPs in Rome, Milan, and now Turin help us simultaneously deliver great experiences for our clients across Italy and address their data governance concerns,” Cucchi said.

Cucchi noted that Google Cloud helps Gruppo Maggioli respond to increasing client interest in hybrid cloud solutions. His team is exploring use of Anthos to manage GKE clusters and workloads running across Google Cloud, on-premises, or other public clouds.

“Our business is driven by constantly changing customer needs,” said Cucchi. “With Google Cloud, we’ve established a solid reference implementation and a trusted, preferred cloud provider relationship. At the same time, we appreciate the opportunity for great flexibility with a consistent managed Kubernetes experience across environments that seamlessly adapts to our customers’ requirements.”

A brighter future

So far, Gruppo Maggioli has migrated to Google Cloud several of its popular applications, including  Municipium, Sicraweb, Icaro, Sportello Telematico, and others. “We see benefits in terms of high quality of service (QoS) and availability. This helps us deliver excellent services to our clients,” said Cucchi.

Gruppo Maggioli uses Looker Studio to analyze its business data and create impactful visualizations of key metrics. With timely insights, the company’s leadership can make better decisions to guide its future.

The firm’s digital transformation has included organizational change. “We’ve helped our IT staff develop new skills in cloud best practices to maintain our legacy of innovation,” said Stefano Palazzi, software factory director, Gruppo Maggioli. “As a result, Gruppo Maggioli continues to modernize and improve integrated digital public administration services to benefit citizens, businesses, and other constituents.”