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The Italian municipality of Terni is making available as open source its Unified Threat Management (UTM) system, along with installation and configuration manuals. Terni's IT department says their system could be used by any mid-sized municipality.

Terni, about one hundred kilometres north of Rome, is the capital of the region of Umbria. With help from the regional open source competence centre (CCOS), the city's IT department combined several open source applications. Together these offer all the staff in Terni secure way to remotely access the city's IT applications, and protects the system against intrusions, computer viruses and spam.

According to a report by Tutt Oggi, a regional news site, Terni uses the system to protect a computer network involving more than a thousand PCs, in offices spread over the city.

Development of the UTM started in April last year. After testing and training, the project was completed in early May, this year.

On a web site dedicated to its UTM the Terni details that the total cost for developing the system are a little over 13,000 euro. Half of that was covered by CCOS.

The UTM in Terni is based on servers running Red Hat Linux. The system involves several common open source security applications, including firewall configuration tool Shorewall, proxy server Squid, e-mail virus scanner Clamav and openVPN. Terni is making available all of its UTM documentation, in Italian.

More information:
Open source site of the Municipality of Terni (in Italian)
Tutt Oggi news item (in Italian)
Flavia Marzano's report (in Italian)