Mr. Chair, thank you for the question.
Yes, indeed, Shared Services Canada was created in August 2011 to fundamentally change the way IT infrastructure is managed and delivered in the Government of Canada. I'll specify IT infrastructure because it's not everything IT in government. It really is those parts of IT that can be delivered in a common way as a common platform to all departments, so exactly things like e-mail systems.
When departments created their own e-mail systems in the mid-1990s, the technology wasn't robust enough to deliver an e-mail system for 377,000 people, so each department built their own e-mail systems. With that, they used different technologies. They used different platforms. They created firewalls, of course, around their e-mail systems. Over time that created a complexity and a lack of efficiency that technology, in fact, gave us the ability to overcome. One key part of this was to give all departments the same e-mail system and bring them all within the same network that way.
Similarly, the networking—wide area networks that link up whole organizations, local area networks that link up a single workplace, all of those things—was also built individually by departments. Each department would have its wide area network and its own local area networks in all of its locations. For example, you would have something like an office building at 4900 Yonge Street in Toronto where you might have five or six departments. You would have five or six wide area networks entering the building from each of the departments, and each of them inside would have created their own local area networks. Over time all of this became what looked to me like spaghetti, a real mix of wiring, which is expensive. It's inefficient. It slows down the performance. It's bad for service. What we are doing is looking at all of that networking. We're going to create a single integrated voice data and video network for the Government of Canada on a much more rational basis.
The third component of IT infrastructure transformation is data centres. When you work on an application of any kind, that application relies on data that has to be stored somewhere. Departments have set up their own data centres. Some of them are quite large; some of them are just sort of a room in an office building where they've created a raised floor and put in servers. All of this had become very diverse with different kinds of technology being used, different kinds of products. There were 485 different places across the country where departments were storing data. We are going to reduce that to a consolidated footprint of seven purpose-built data centres, some of which are already built, others of which will be secured from the private sector. You can imagine how that is going to cut down on costs, not only because we're going from 600,000 square feet to about 235,000 square feet. For this, again, technology has increased the capacity to have highly dense data centres. Also, if you go back to the question of networking and data transmission costs, when you have data located in 485 places, just moving it around is going to cost money as opposed to having it located in highly consolidated places.
That's the overall vision. That's the plan at the end of the day. We will have a single, secure, integrated network linking up seven highly dense, modern, reliable, and secure data centres across the Government of Canada.
