Italy plans to set up a national agency tasked with combating cyber attacks as it continues work on its unified cloud infrastructure.

The country is one of many European nations attempting to enhance their cybersecurity capabilities.

Many aspects of Italy’s digital security, which are dispersed among various Ministers and state bodies, are to be brought together under the authority of the Prime Minister.

The general director and his deputy will be appointed for four years, according to a draft decree reportedly seen by Reuters. Their mandate can only be renewed once.

The new agency will involve six departments and will, in the first instance, be staffed by 300 employees, with the intention of boosting this number to 800 by 2027.

In April 2021, the Italian Government delivered a 2,500-page recovery plan tothe European Commission, which detailed an intention to utilise new cloud technology for public administration to increase security.

The plan would need investment from the EU with about €900 million apparently earmarked for it.

The project would also involve overseas tech companies, Innovation Minister Vittorio Colao announced in May.

With American-owned Amazon, Google and Microsoft being the world’s major cloud players, concerns over potential surveillance had been raised due to the adoption of the U.S. CLOUD Act of 2018.

Italy intends to create the cloud infrastructure through a public-private partnership, which will be implemented by a European tender.

VMware Cloud is a distributed, multi-cloud platform that enables organizations to accelerate application modernization across the data center, edge, and any cloud. It provides distinctive advantages to both developers and IT operators who are often forced to make tradeoffs. VMware Cloud boosts developer productivity by enabling them to build and deploy to any cloud. The platform enables IT to modernize infrastructure and operations with better economics and less risk. With the launch of VMware Cloud, VMware is announcing new offerings that bring a more integrated experience to customers. These offerings include:

+ VMware Cloud Universal: a flexible subscription that simplifies the purchase and consumption of VMware multi-cloud infrastructure and management services.

+ VMware Cloud Console:a single monitoring and management environment for VMware Cloud infrastructure regardless of where it’s deployed.

+ VMware App Navigator: a new offering for assessing and prioritizing app transformation initiatives across an entire application estate based on the value of each app.

“We are on the cusp of the next evolution of cloud and apps. Architectures are becoming distributed and increasingly multi-cloud, while modern applications will soon outnumber traditional apps. The challenge for any CIO is to take advantage of this new innovation without introducing more complexity and risk,” said Raghu Raghuram, chief operating officer, products and cloud services, VMware. “VMware Cloud is the only cloud solution today that customers can use in the data center and on any cloud, accelerating their modernization journey with speed, simplicity, and better security. With VMware Cloud Universal, customers make a single purchase and gain the ability to deploy apps across any environment, then move them as business or application requirements change.”

Modular, Multi-Cloud Services for All Applications, Everywhere

Application initiatives are driving better business outcomes, an elevated customer experience, innovative digital services, and the anywhere workforce. VMware research shows that 90% of app initiatives are focused on modernization(1), and 80% of organizations today deploy applications in a distributed model across data center, cloud, and edge.

VMware Cloud is the platform for both on-premises and cloud with unified security and operations, supporting traditional and modern applications; connecting to all native cloud services; and meeting the requirements of both developers and IT operators. With VMware Cloud, customers gain the simplicity of a single cloud operating model for their multi-cloud reality, and gain portability to help minimize to help address the challenges of single cloud silos. VMware Cloud customers can realize substantive benefits including as much as 80 percent better developer productivity with VMware Tanzu Application Service (3), 59 percent lower operational costs(4), and 46% faster cloud migration.

With VMware Cloud, customers can deploy apps to VMware Cloud Foundation running in AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, and Oracle Cloud; on VMware Cloud on Dell EMC; and across hundreds of VMware Cloud Verified partners. VMware Marketplace provides customers access to thousands of validated third party and open-source developer solutions. VMware Cloud customers can also deploy andoperate across native public clouds, and give developers access to allnative cloud services.

What Is the Google Cloud Storage Connector for Hadoop?

The Cloud Storage Connector for Hadoop — often referred to as the GCS Connector — is an open-source Java client library that runs inside Hadoop JVMs. It enables Hadoop-based workloads, including Apache Spark jobs and Hadoop Compatible File System (HCFS) CLI operations, to read from and write to Google Cloud Storage (GCS) directly, in place of or alongside the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS).

Google Cloud Platform announced an updated version of the connector that focuses on throughput efficiency for columnar file formats such as Apache Parquet and ORC, stronger isolation for Cloud Storage directory modifications, and a series of broad performance improvements including lower latency, increased parallelization, and smarter configuration defaults.

Why Replace HDFS with Cloud Storage?

Storing big data workloads in Google Cloud Storage rather than HDFS offers several practical advantages for teams running Hadoop or Spark at scale:

• Cost reduction: Cloud Storage eliminates the need for a long-running HDFS cluster with three on-disk replicas, which can be significantly more expensive to operate continuously.
• Storage–compute separation: Decoupling storage from compute lets teams scale each layer independently based on actual demand rather than keeping them locked together.
• Persistent storage after cluster shutdown: Unlike HDFS, which is tied to cluster lifetime, Cloud Storage buckets persist after Hadoop clusters are terminated, preventing data loss and reducing costs from always-on clusters.
• Shared buckets across clusters: Multiple ephemeral Hadoop clusters can read from and write to the same Cloud Storage buckets simultaneously, simplifying multi-cluster architectures.
• No storage administration overhead: Tasks like HDFS upgrades, balancing, and maintaining high availability are eliminated — GCS handles durability and availability natively.

Compatibility and Deployment

The GCS Connector is fully open source and officially supported by Google Cloud Platform. It comes pre-configured in Cloud Dataproc, GCP’s managed Hadoop and Spark service. However, it can also be installed and used with other Hadoop distributions, including Hortonworks, Cloudera, and MapR, making it a viable path for migrating on-premises HDFS data to the cloud or bursting workloads onto GCP infrastructure.

Performance Improvements in the Updated GCS Connector

The updated release includes a range of targeted performance optimizations. Key improvements include:

Directory Rename Parallelization

In addition to using Cloud Storage batch requests, the connector now executes those batches in parallel. According to Google, this reduces the rename time for a directory containing 32,000 files from approximately 15 minutes down to 1 minute 30 seconds — a roughly 10× improvement.

Latency Optimizations

The connector reduces the number of Cloud Storage API requests required to complete high-level Hadoop file system operations, cutting round-trip overhead and lowering overall operation latency.

Concurrent Glob Algorithm Execution

Both regular and flat glob algorithms now run concurrently, allowing the connector to automatically yield the best-performing result for a given file tree structure — whether it is deep and hierarchical or wide and shallow.

Smarter Implicit Directory Repair

Implicit directory repair is now triggered during delete and rename operations rather than during list and glob operations. This change reduces the latency of expensive list and glob calls and removes the requirement for write permissions on read-only requests, improving security posture for read workloads.

Cloud Storage Read Consistency

The connector enforces requests against a consistent version of a Cloud Storage object, preventing scenarios where different parts of a read operation inadvertently access different object versions. This improves both data correctness and read performance.

Columnar Format Throughput: Parquet and ORC

One of the headline improvements in this release is increased throughput efficiency for columnar file formats — particularly Apache Parquet and ORC (Optimized Row Columnar). These formats are widely used in data lake and analytics workloads on Hive, Spark SQL, and Presto, making this improvement directly relevant to teams running analytical pipelines on GCP.

Summary

The updated Google Cloud Storage Connector for Hadoop is a meaningful step toward making Cloud Storage a production-grade replacement for HDFS in big data environments. With improvements to directory operation speed, read latency, glob performance, and columnar format throughput, the connector lowers both the operational complexity and the performance gap that has historically made HDFS migration difficult. Teams running Hadoop or Spark — whether on Cloud Dataproc or on-premises distributions — should evaluate this release as part of their cloud migration or hybrid architecture planning.

The GCS Connector source code is available on GitHub under the Google Cloud Platform organization. Refer to the official GCP documentation for installation guides and current release notes.