Thank you, Minister.
Without a doubt, that work has continued. It's really important. Some of the buildings were at their end of life. We needed to get the data centres out of there and into what we call modern end-state data centres. We continue to work very hard. In the last two years we've exceeded our targets—120% last year, and over 100% of target this year. Just about 100 data centres were closed this past year.
We continue to significantly reduce the number of data centres that we're closing, but the goal isn't just to shut data centres. As you say, it's the applications that reside in them and making sure that we have robust strategies so that those applications can continue to operate. We're doing that. We're moving them to more modern data centres. We're making sure that when we can't get to them, we're replacing hardware so that they no longer have the same risks. Not all of them need to be moved. For some of them, it's just a good bit of maintenance and upgrades to make sure they're functional.
With respect to cloud, absolutely, we've seen an acceleration because it's about speed and scale. To some of the comments about call centres earlier, when you go from a few thousand calls to hundreds of thousands of calls a minute, you need to be able to scale up very quickly. Cloud provides the ability to do that.
We're very pleased to report that, through the co-operation of the CSE and the policy direction of the CIO, we're ensuring that the journey to cloud is safe for Canadians and for the government. We have a secure channel to cloud, so that when applications do exist in the cloud, the network and the path there is secure.
All of our cloud contracts are protected. That includes things like the Patriot Act and others, where all the cloud data centres are on Canadian soil for departments to be able to use for protected information. The work has accelerated, and we are ensuring that it is done in a very secure and safe manner.