Trento (Italy), February 15, 2021 - Slightly over six months from the unveiling to the market of Deda Cloud, the Managed Cloud Services Provider — formed within Deda Group by leveraging its over 20 years of experience and vision in digital transformation — announces the signing of a preliminary agreement for the acquisition of IFInet, an ICT company headquartered in Verona that specializes in cybersecurity, network security, connectivity, networking, datacenter infrastructure and the cloud. The deal represents a strategic partnership for the cloud services leader Deda Group, which by integrating IFInet will strengthen its ability to shape the evolution towards the cloud and as-a-service models through its profound, cutting-edge cybersecurity expertise.    

While in recent years companies have become increasingly aware of how crucial the cloud is to improving their flexibility and efficiency, driving them to invest, particularly over the last 12 months, in this technology to respond to uncertainty and the need to reorganize themselves quickly, Deda Cloud — with its range of hybrid, multicloud solutions, has made a mission of enabling business-owners and top managers to move beyond this approach, helping them interpret and plan the cloud as a bridge to the future for their businesses, as a governance and strategic tool.  

The cloud, just like a bridge, is a piece of infrastructure that is complex to plan and design, a crucial, powerful part of choosing a direction, a key point to be protected that must enable those who use it to reach their destinations safely. It is in this light that one should view the agreement reached with IFInet, which strengthens one of the crucial pillars of Deda Cloud's range to meet the growing risks tied to cybercrime.   

Formal closing of the transaction is subject to the satisfaction of all conditions set in the agreement and is expected to occur by April 2021. 

Marco Podini, Dedagroup’s Executive Chairman, commented the transaction as follows: “Deda Cloud designs the backbone infrastructure of tomorrow for its clients, bringing all the expertise of Group companies to bear on industrial applications and solutions, acting as technological enabler to them and all of Deda. Digitalization is finally at the heart of the debate concerning growth and the revitalization of Italy's economy. Deda Group is working in various areas and with all the technologies that are driving innovation to interpret the far-reaching changes that are taking place. As part of this process, we have drawn up a solid industrial growth plan calling for acquisitions in the most strategic areas, such as cybersecurity, as witnessed by the important IFInet deal. Security is at the top of the list of priorities to be achieved, in keeping with the increasingly stringent European data protection standards. This is also the backdrop to our involvement in the GAIA-X project, which we view as a way of enabling our clients to pursue global strategies without having to give up a European approach to data governance, with Italian data centers and partners also focusing on sustainability issues.” 

Claudio Abad, Deda Cloud’s CEO, added: “More and more often, we are finding ourselves advising business owners and CEOs on the most reliable IT strategies for their businesses. We help them break the code of the current market, enabling them to make their own decisions in technology — an inherently complex subject — as in other areas. The integration and partnership with IFInet represent an important step that strengthens our market position because it contributes to our security-by-design model, which we also wish to apply transversally to all our solutions, making them increasingly complete and efficient, as well as simpler, for our clients.”  

Deda Cloud’s ecosystem of HiTech/HiTouch services is thus being enhanced along both of its axes to include the networking layer, expand network security and data center and cloud management solutions and deepening the entire range of solutions with a security-by-design approach that will enhance all services and provide access to premium protection solutions. The two companies’ combined portfolio will provide integrated expertise in cloud strategies, experience in IT consulting projects, SOC (security operations center) services, red, blue and purple team services, and virtual CISO and NOC (network operations center) solutions. The tools and procedures for controlling, monitoring, updating and optimizing the resources both companies use to develop their services will also be pooled.  

Founded in 1996, IFInet develops IT solutions for networking, network security, cyber security, data center and cloud infrastructure management and services managed according to the cosourcing (collaborative outsourcing) model, designed and industrialized since 2000, thanks to a team of 40 highly qualified professionals. Its Security Operations Center means its clients can count on guaranteed, secure IT infrastructure. Multicloud architectures, data centers with SOC and NOC operational 24 hours a day, over 6,000 man-days invested in research and development of new ICT and security technologies, over 60,000 sensors monitored in real time and over 60 TB of backup data managed every day are just a few of the indicators of the Company’s capabilities and expertise. 

Bruno Giacometti, IFInet’s Founder and CEO, concluded: “I am particularly pleased to see IFInet joining such an important company as Deda Group, whose strength and growth are based precisely on increasingly numerous synergies and integrations of competencies into the Group. Its deep technical expertise, constant search for innovative solutions and collaborative outsourcing approach have always made a successful model for IFInet to offer its clients, and starting today it will be even more complete.” 

Out of the conviction that the cloud is a strategic and governance tool, Deda Cloud is already among the first operators capable of bringing it to companies through an innovative, advanced service management platform. The combination of the two companies’ service delivery best practices will also converge in this powerful tool, which makes it simple for all the various levels of an organization to understand the many elements that form the bridge to the future: technological infrastructure. A platform that thanks to an intuitive interface also allows strategic non-technical personnel to have an immediate, up-to-date picture of the systems and how they work. A tool that brings a greater awareness to the decisions that need to be made at critical junctures, such as those following cyber-attacks which, as is now common knowledge, are inevitable and therefore require increasingly sophisticated tools to manage them quickly and effectively. 

Dedagroup’s advisors in the transaction were Studio Scozzi and Studio Legale Valli e Mancuso, whereas IFInet was advised by Plus Value Consulting and Studio Legale Giliberti Triscornia e Associati.