Abstract

The paper presents the results of an investigation carried out in Italy by accessing the information materials that Amazon Web Services produces for public administrations, agencies and companies in the health and welfare sectors. The goal is to offer an exploratory view, preparatory to systematic research, of how AWS aims to become a key infrastructure for the digitization of welfare systems. In the absence of a national proprietary backbone the dismantling of Italian public administration data centers envisioned by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) tends to fuel the pervasiveness of dominant platforms in data processing, such as Amazon and Google, and thus to determine the evolution of the digitization of our welfare system.