Introducing Gruppo Maggioli
Gruppo Maggioli is a family-owned business with over 100 years of history, leading a group of companies operating across Europe and Latin America. With over 3,500 employees, Gruppo Maggioli is a leading partner for public administration organizations. It also offers solutions for healthcare, private companies, and professionals, supporting them in their digital transformation.
The Group combines experience, technological innovation, and sustainability, developing solutions in key areas including citizen services, smart cities and IoT, healthcare and welfare, urban security, cultural heritage, cloud, AI, cybersecurity, data management, document management, and tax management.
Gruppo Maggioli’s unique strength lies in its integrated offering of software, technologies, custom projects, services, consulting, training, and digital publishing. These capabilities enable the generation of value, efficiency, security, and integration, helping to promote a better quality of life for users, citizens, and businesses, and establishing the Group as a leading partner in digital innovation.
Particularly in the sphere of cloud, the organization supports local authorities throughout Italy in the adoption and modernization of infrastructure.
Introducing CloudFire
CloudFire, a key partner in this and other projects with Grouppo Maggioli, is a Reggio Emilia-based Italian Cloud Service Provider specialized in the integration of cloud native technologies and services. Leveraging deep technical expertise, CloudFire supports managed service providers, IT teams and both public and private organizations in adopting container-based infrastructures, designing hybrid and multi-cloud architectures built around containers.
Among its core offerings, CloudFire provides Rancher as a Service — a tailored solution that combines infrastructure, DevOps services, governance and operational support within a fully managed containerized environment. This solution enables the automation of Kubernetes cluster lifecycle management and simplifies the deployment of cloud native applications, while ensuring security, operational continuity and regulatory compliance. The service is delivered with the direct support of a team of certified cloud native experts who guide clients and partners through every stage of the journey.
At-a-Glance
Gruppo Maggioli, a leading international ICT partner for the public sector, supports over 6,000 public administration organizations across Italy with its solutions. To accelerate their customers’ digital transformation initiatives, Gruppo Maggioli partnered with CloudFire to distribute its flagship application, Sicraweb EVO, into a cloud native platform orchestrated with SUSE Rancher Prime. Sicraweb EVO can now be deployed across any environment, including private clouds, without compromising performance, reliability or security.
The journey to containers
As a leader in public-sector digital transformation projects, Gruppo Maggioli is an active participant in implementing the processes required to meet the objectives of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP). For many years, the company has offered Sicraweb EVO, a customized and constantly evolving application suite specially designed for the needs of public-sector administration. Over 3,000 local government organizations use Sicraweb EVO to manage core services including demographics, documentation, health and social care, tax, policing and more.
Stefano Ricci, Technical Area Manager at Gruppo Maggioli, says: “A key part of our mission is to accompany public-sector bodies on their transformation journeys. We bring cutting-edge solutions to every region to streamline public administration services.”
Historically, Gruppo Maggioli deployed Sicraweb EVO across multiple on-premises infrastructures. To add flexibility and align with NRRP’s cloud-first ethos, the company decided to create a new containerized Sicraweb EVO solution delivered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) on all major public and private platforms qualified by the Italy’s National Cybersecurity Agency (ACN).
“Residents in Italy rely on Sicraweb EVO to access public services, and government employees rely on the application to deliver them,” continues Ricci. “We saw that adopting SUSE Rancher Prime on a containerized infrastructure would allow us to manage multiple environments spread across siloed infrastructures through a single console, driving process standardization while complying with security and reliability guidelines.”
Vittorio Cicognani, Head of Cloud Team at Gruppo Maggioli, comments: “Containers are particularly valuable when it comes to public and private cloud platforms, as each provider has their own proprietary technologies that make it hard to move applications from one cloud to another. Containers ensure applications remain portable across multiple clouds.”
He continues: “To accelerate this modernization journey, Gruppo Maggioli sought a partner with proven expertise in Kubernetes to ensure portability while meeting stringent data sovereignty requirements. For this reason, we chose SUSE technologies with the support of a reliable partner like CloudFire.”
“The combination of modern cloud native technologies in SUSE Rancher Prime underpinning Sicraweb EVO and SUSE Multi-Linux Support for our legacy operating systems on qualified platforms allows us to operate with confidence.”
Vittorio Cicognani
Head of Cloud Team
Gruppo Maggioli
Why SUSE Rancher Prime?
Gruppo Maggioli has entered a strategic partnership with CloudFire, a leading managed service provider and SUSE business partner, for the distribution of Sicraweb EVO across local and regional data centers.
“CloudFire recommended SUSE Rancher Prime for its flexibility, ease of use and ease of deployment,” says Ricci. “CloudFire also had strong skills and expertise in the SUSE portfolio, which gave us added confidence that we could achieve our goals with SUSE Rancher Prime.”
CloudFire worked with Gruppo Maggioli to design a containerized architecture for Sicraweb EVO. The architecture is based on SUSE Rancher Prime's enterprise-ready, next-generation Kubernetes distribution RKE2, SUSE Storage (formerly Longhorn) and DevOps tools including Terraform and Ansible. Developed using a GitOps methodology and protected with backup and recovery capabilities from Veeam Kasten for Kubernetes, this new architecture enables Gruppo Maggioli to deploy its web-native application in a standardized way across multiple platforms.
SUSE Rancher Prime also includes advanced enterprise capabilities that support platform security, governance and operations. These include:
- curated Application Collection for hardened container images with SBOMs and signatures;
- policy-as-code enforcement via Kubewarden;
- full-stack monitoring through SUSE Observability.
While Gruppo Maggioli is exploring the adoption of these components, their availability within the SUSE Rancher Prime subscription ensures a clear path to enhanced compliance, resilience, and operational insight.
These capabilities align strongly with public sector priorities around digital sovereignty, empowering customers to retain control over their data and infrastructure within national and EU-compliant environments.
Why SUSE Multi-Linux Support?
In parallel with the SUSE Rancher Prime project, CloudFire performed a thorough review of Gruppo Maggioli’s existing infrastructure. The analysis revealed approximately 600 end-of-life CentOS servers running a range of services.
“Rebuilding hundreds of virtual machines would have been a costly and time-consuming project, but CloudFire gave us a way to avoid this,” explains Cicognani. “With SUSE Multi-Linux Support, we get sustained maintenance and support services for CentOS guaranteed for the next three years, giving us valuable time to complete our modernization strategy for these end-of-life systems.”
The impact of SUSE solutions
Migrating 1,500 customers to the cloud
Since partnering with CloudFire to build a modern cloud infrastructure, Gruppo Maggioli has helped over 1,500 public entities (10% of which are using SUSE Rancher Prime infrastructure) adopt the new SaaS Sicraweb EVO. Deployed across four Maggioli data centers in Italy, their infrastructure includes 18 clusters managed by SUSE Rancher Prime and 170 nodes running RKE2 with more than 4.5 petabytes of persistent storage.
“Since the second half of 2023, we onboarded more than 1,500 public-sector bodies to the cloud,” says Cicognani. “SUSE Rancher Prime is a key enabler of this move to a cloud native architecture because it allows us to see and manage multiple Kubernetes clusters while maintaining centralized governance. The solution also unifies the differences between these regional data centers, making it easier to manage such a large-scale environment.”
Boosting performance, reliability and security
The adoption of SUSE Rancher Prime and SUSE Multi-Linux Support is already bringing significant benefits to Gruppo Maggioli and its end users. The company has eliminated many of the challenges associated with deploying the previous version of its application on heterogenous infrastructure with regional in-house teams, enabling higher and more consistent levels of performance, uptime and security.
“The combination of modern cloud native technologies in SUSE Rancher Prime underpinning Sicraweb EVO and SUSE Multi-Linux Support for our legacy operating systems on qualified platforms allows us to operate with confidence,” says Cicognani. “Kubernetes will also help ensure faster updates, improved scalability and more effective incident response.”
Meeting stringent security requirements with RKE2
Originally built to meet the U.S. Federal Government’s FIPS 140-2 security standard, RKE2 is a fully conformant Kubernetes distribution that focuses on security and compliance. Gruppo Maggioli adopted SUSE Rancher Prime RKE2, taking advantage of its defaults and configuration options. These make it easier to build compliant systems that meet the tough security standards of Gruppo Maggioli’s government customers.
Simplifying storage and digital sovereignty
Gruppo Maggioli runs SUSE Storage to provide a powerful cloud native distributed storage platform for Kubernetes that can run anywhere — ideal for its customers’ flexibility and security requirements. In combination with SUSE Rancher Prime, SUSE Storage makes it easy for Gruppo Maggioli to deploy highly available and persistent block storage for its customers’ Kubernetes environments.
The built-in incremental snapshot and backup features within SUSE Storage simplify the protection of data for Gruppo Maggioli’s customers, as well as providing easy failover options in the event of a disaster. Together, SUSE Rancher Prime and SUSE Storage give Gruppo Maggioli’s government customers confidence that they can maintain digital sovereignty by keeping all data under control in trusted, compliant locations.
Maintaining regulatory compliance
Throughout the implementation process and beyond, CloudFire has helped Gruppo Maggioli maintain compliance with domestic and European Union regulations around data security and sovereignty.
Ricci comments: “We operate in multiple countries, including Spain, Greece and more. Thanks to our collaboration with the CloudFire team and the use of SUSE Rancher Prime, we deployed the Sicraweb EVO software only in certified data centers within Italy for our Italian public administration customers, helping to ensure compliance with the digital sovereignty criteria established by the ACN.”
CloudFire also helped Gruppo Maggioli take advantage of the self-healing and resilience capabilities of SUSE Rancher Prime, helping to ensure that partial infrastructure failures do not compromise services for end users of Sicraweb EVO.
Saving time with responsive support
With CloudFire and SUSE handling most of the day-to-day management and support of the new SUSE Rancher Prime environments, Gruppo Maggioli is free to focus on developing and enhancing Sicraweb EVO.
Ricci confirms: “CloudFire performs the bulk of the infrastructure management tasks and they’ve also made a big effort to share their SUSE Rancher Prime knowledge and skills. As a result, and with the support of a user-friendly interface that streamlines tasks, we can now resolve most first-level support requests ourselves, which saves a great deal of time.”
CloudFire’s responsive support is backed by the deep expertise of SUSE Support, which provides 24/7 assistance informed by 25 years of work in the Linux ecosystem.
What's next for Gruppo Maggioli?
Building on the success of its modernization program, Gruppo Maggioli plans to shift more of its public administration applications to cloud platforms. The company is currently working with CloudFire to distribute its ICARO EVO health and social care application in the same SUSE Rancher Prime environment, promoting greater standardization and scalability across its offerings.
Gruppo Maggioli is expanding its use of SUSE solutions. Cicognani says: “We recently worked with CloudFire to conduct a successful proof of concept for SUSE Observability. We’re currently deploying the solution, which will give us complete, real-time visibility across our SUSE Rancher Prime environments.”