Case Study: Sky Italia achieves an agile, secure, and cost-efficient streaming platform with VMware Software-Defined Data Center

Sky Italia a Software-defined Architecture for the Streaming Platform

Sky Italia, part of the Sky Group and a major Italian broadcaster, needed to modernize its streaming platform to support growing on‑demand demand while maintaining strict security and high availability. The legacy firewall- and storage‑based architecture lacked the scalability, flexibility and cost efficiency required to protect CDN and origin servers, increase program availability, and reduce capex and opex.

To address this, Sky implemented a VMware Software‑Defined Data Center stack (NSX, vSAN, vRealize Network Insight) on Intel NVMe/SSD hardware, adopting micro‑segmentation, automated flow‑based firewall rules and a policy‑driven network tied to workloads. The new hyper‑converged platform improved security visibility, enabled seamless workload migration across sites and clouds, removed hardware bottlenecks, and delivered faster time‑to‑market plus measurable reductions in operational and capital costs.

Sky

Davide Gandino

Head of Streaming, Cloud & Computing Systems - Engineering