Case Study

Aruba Enterprise for the Ministry of Education

Advanced Email (PEL) and Certified Email (PEC) services to advance the digitisation of public sector processes.

The Organization

The Ministry of Education is responsible for State functions and duties in the field of school education.

Its work is primarily focused on areas such as: defining laws, curricula, national recommendations and guidelines, as a framework for the curriculum for educational institutions within the national education and training system; organizing school education in general, the legal status of school staff, training for school heads, teachers, administrative, technical and support staff; defining the criteria and parameters for implementing social measures in schools, support for deprived areas in order to maintain consistency in school and educational services; research and trials of innovative approaches to educational requirements; recognizing qualifications and certifications from Europe and the rest of the world and implementing common European Union education policies; defining guidelines for the National Assessment System; identifying targets and standards for training courses and maintaining relationships with organizers of training schemes in different regions; defining guidelines for officially-recognized private schools and for schools and education courses not run by the state; overseeing activities related to student and parent associations; the right to study and family services, promoting the status of students, educational and careers advice; maintaining international relations, bilaterally and multilaterally; and promoting the internationalization of the education and training system.

The requirements

For many years, the Ministry of Education has offered teachers and school staff school email addresses, where messages relating to their institution can be sent, including newsletters or copies of requests submitted during the course of various relevant administrative procedures – such as registering for school rankings, mobility applications and retirement applications, to name but a few. The need arose to update and enhance this service – previously provided directly by the Administration’s own infrastructure - by using a service provider working in the Cloud, to achieve a higher quality, more reliable and secure service.

At the same time, the Administration needed to adopt Certified Email Services (PEC) to certify messages between the different PAs and between PAs and citizens.

The Solution

To respond to these specific requirements, Aruba's Enterprise division worked with the Ministry on the following services:

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PEL (email) Agreement with Consip, within the context of which school staff were allocated 650,000 Basic email accounts, but with far superior features and capacity than those normally used by the Administration;
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PEC Certified Email services, via an intermediary provider.

The benefits

The advanced Email solution adopted means that the Ministry can offer school staff an optimized email service, characterized by:

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400 MB of space, much more than previous email accounts;

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A more efficient and user-friendly interface, making it faster and easier to use;

In addition, the service is highly secure, provided by a Rating 4 Data Center, compliant with ANSI/TIA-942 standards, in accordance with current Italian regulations. In fact, Aruba's network of data centers offers the advantage of an infrastructure architecture designed on the basis of redundant data protection and confidentiality logics between two different data centers: thereby guaranteeing maximum availability (or High Availability) for the email (PEL) service.

The extensive flexibility of the service has also meant that the infrastructure can be fully integrated with the Ministry's management procedures, thanks to a set of APIs made available to developers.

Thanks to Aruba's PEL (email) services, the Administration has been able to achieve the following:

  • guarantee continuity of service for school staff, by offering email accounts with improved functionality and capacity;
  • get rid of its obsolete infrastructure by choosing to migrate the service to the Cloud and boosting its security and reliability features;
  • significantly reduce the costs of supplying the service.

Future plans

The next steps for the Administration include using Aruba's Trust services to implement Advanced Electronic Signature solutions, which can be used for procedures such as finalizing contracts for school staff, communicating with state exam boards or in school staff recruitment procedures.
“Our partnership with Aruba Enterprise means that we can deliver the PEL service to our community of school staff, guaranteeing the highest quality and security standards, as well as optimizing the costs of providing the service. It also provides the basis for important projects in digitizing, dematerializing and streamlining school procedures.” Dott. De Santis Paolo – Directorate General for IT Systems and Statistics, Ministry of Education

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