Government Operations Committee on Dec. 3rd, 2013

[Anne-Marie Day, NDP, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

Bandwidth and storage are going to be recurring problems. We are increasingly and strongly encouraged—and this is likely the case in all offices—to use computers and information technology instead of storing our data on hard copies in our filing cabinets. Given the number of people this represents, storage needs will increase exponentially.

Have you determined at what point we would hit a ceiling?

[Liseanne Forand]

Mr. Chair, the objective of our transformation plan is to avoid such an occurrence. It would have happened at some point with our current equipment and capacity. Moreover, the former Auditor General, Ms. Sheila Fraser, outlined this in her 2010 report. She emphasized that our infrastructure is getting older and not meeting current needs.

We are therefore building and planning for the future to ensure that we have the capacity required to meet growing data storage needs.

[Anne-Marie Day, NDP, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

If our storage capacity is increased to be infinite or near-infinite, we can expect the 30-day time frame for the destruction of documents and e-mails to be pushed back.

[Liseanne Forand]

At Shared Services Canada, we are responsible for managing technology. In terms of information management, the files and documents that must be kept under Treasury Board policy and the legislation under which we operate are not destroyed. They are retained due to the obligations of the various departments. In the case of the Old Age Security Program, for example, the documents are kept for dozens of years, I believe. Documents that must be retained are saved in the information management systems.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you.

Ms. Day, your time is up.

I will now give the floor to Mr. Cannan for five minutes.

[Ron Cannan, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

To our witnesses, it is a pleasure to have you back again.

This is a very good news story for Canadians as taxpayers. I'm also very excited about the $75-million savings that you were able to achieve in budget 2012 and accomplishing your four goals. It speaks volumes to your initiatives as a team. As my colleague, Ms. Ablonczy talked about, the consolidation of 63 different e-mail systems down to one is a huge undertaking.

The consolidation of data centres.... In my riding of Kelowna—Lake Country, we have a state-of-the-art ICT high-density giga vault data centre called RackForce and we had Minister Rempel, the Minister of Western Economic Diversification, recently through it on a tour. It's amazing the advances and how far along they are. They're going to have customers from basically around the world who are located.... I know that, because of the fault and from an earthquake perspective, each province and territory has gone through reviews as well. British Columbia looked to the interior rather than the coastlines because of the earthquake aspects. So I understand the private sector and how it's been using data centres.

What is intriguing is this. You said in the preamble to your report that you're going down from 485 data centres to seven, which is a huge undertaking. Can you maybe expand on that for the committee, as to how you would expect to complete this and the timeline you would hope to complete this by?

[Liseanne Forand]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

If you will allow me, I will let my colleague, Mr. Long, answer this question. He has been working very hard on this issue for nearly two and a half years.

[Benoît Long, Senior Assistant Deputy Minister, Transformation, Service Strategy and Design Branch, Shared Services Canada]

Thank you, Ms. Forand.

Our plan for the consolidation of data centres is to look at the services that are delivered inside those facilities, and then to consolidate them into fewer facilities. Our goal has been to identify the data centre locations using objective criteria and science to establish where those locations would be, and then to build those data centres in pairs. The reason for pairs is that it allows for disaster recovery between the data centres in cases of emergency, or for business continuity reasons.

The process by which we're going to consolidate is, first, to look at the individual servers that exist within the data centres, then to go to much larger computers and servers, and then to bring all of the applications and the systems that run on those servers into fewer, much more dense, much more efficient, and environmentally friendly data centres over the next seven years. It is a very large-scale effort. As Madam Forand said, the 485 data centres are located across the country in all sorts of buildings. There are very few—only two—purpose-built data centres within the Government of Canada. So our goal is to move to very modern facilities over the next number of years, because of the scale and complexity of what has to be done.

[Ron Cannan, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

That's fantastic.

As a fiscal conservative, I'm always interested in the savings. Have you had a chance to do a preliminary estimate of anticipated savings?

[Benoît Long]

There's no question that our three objectives will be met: savings, improved services, and security.

On the security side right now, with the data centres located in multiple environments, and with diverse security policies being applied across all of them, moving to a much more standardized set of security services will provide enhanced security for all the data that is going to be stored in these data centres.

From a service perspective, we know we can standardize and enhance all of the support services, largely operating on a 24-7 basis. We're going to be able to enhance those services and those service levels.

Finally, on the savings front, we have looked at the savings we expect in our seven-year plan. Our goal is to achieve those savings over every year throughout the process and the planning period, and I believe it's in the order of $99 million.

[Ron Cannan, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

A savings of $99 million—I love it. Thank you.

With regard to supplementary estimates (B), in your report you indicate your request for $12.9 million, which is attributed to a couple of new initiatives. Could you share with the committee what those new initiatives are and what the IT funding will be applied to?

[Liseanne Forand]

Thank you for the question.

Our supplementary estimates involve two broad categories of new moneys for Shared Services Canada.

One grouping is transfers from other departments in the continuing effort to get the numbers right after the creation of Shared Services Canada. Appropriations from departments were transferred to us, and there's continuing calculation as to whether we got the right amount or not. There are some amounts we give back and some amounts that we get back. The transfers are about $6.9 million.

The balance of $5.98 million is for new projects that other government departments are leading but that need IT infrastructure. I'll give you an example: the committee was talking about borders during the earlier testimony. There are initiatives such as an entry-exit capacity at Canadian borders. They would need for that initiative some IT infrastructure. They're going to need bandwidth, servers, and equipment that we provide. The lead department would be Citizenship and Immigration Canada, and we would be a part of that. In the supplementary estimates (B), in the horizontal initiatives, all of those kinds of initiatives are listed.

[Ron Cannan, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Thank you very much. That's excellent. All the best, and keep up the good work.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you.

Mr. Byrne, you have the floor. You have five minutes.

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

My thanks to our witnesses for appearing before us.

Would you be able to inform the committee as to whether or not the PCO is a client of Shared Services Canada with respect to electronic record-keeping in information technology?

[Liseanne Forand]

Thank you for the question.

Yes, the Privy Council Office is one of Shared Services Canada's partner departments.

—by virtue of the orders in council that were passed to that effect.

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

In a previous meeting of this committee, a witness indicated that you would be a better source to explain to the committee the system architecture employed at PCO for the retention of records on their servers.

Would you be able to enlighten the committee as to the makeup of that architecture?

[Liseanne Forand]

We are responsible for providing, maintaining, and supporting the IT infrastructure that supports the Privy Council Office, which does include their e-mail system. So we are the technical authorities with respect to their e-mail system.

I will ask my colleague Benoît Long if he has any comments regarding the architecture of that system. I believe it's a standard way of providing e-mails, but I will ask Benoît, if you will allow, to comment on the architecture aspect of it.

[Benoît Long]

Briefly, the architecture is built around an application called Outlook and Exchange. The system is built around desktops that have a client through which users access their e-mails. Then inside the data centre there will be servers—computers—that house the data and the application itself.

The data may or may not be—in this case I don't know—stored on multiple servers or backed up in a different data centre, depending on the configurations departments have chosen. So that's the general architecture of the applications.

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

So if there were a request to destroy data, as per some pre-existing protocol within a particular department, would the department in question, which is your client, be able to do that from their own system or would they actually have to provide you with a request to destroy data?

[Liseanne Forand]

I don't think I can answer that as to whether they would do it themselves or we would do it for them.

If there is something they want done on their systems, they can make a request to us. They put a request in, and I will say at this point that the people from Shared Services Canada who would be responding to such a request would be on a technical team. They would get a request from a client department and then they would set out exactly what was involved in that request.

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

It's an interesting circumstance, because you just indicated that data could be held on multiple servers in multiple locations, as per the system architecture or configurations right now. It would be helpful if you could answer that question for us, and if you could get back to the committee with a more definitive response, through the chair, that would be very much appreciated.

[Liseanne Forand]

Mr. Chairman, I would simply say that users of the system do not have access to the servers. Only the administrator of an IT system has access to the servers. So the extent to which a user can affect what is on the servers is based on what that user can do from his or her desktop.

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

So the administrator would be at Shared Services Canada, or would the administrator be from the client department?

[Liseanne Forand]

Shared Services Canada is responsible for the system infrastructure. The client department is responsible for the information management policies that apply there.