Thank you for the question and for your kind words.
I am grateful to you for that.
For us, moving forward, we have a document. It's available publicly. It's called SSC 3.0. It aligns with the minister's digital vision. It clearly lays out what we believe were the priorities before COVID, and it was reaffirmed during COVID. These continue to be our priorities moving forward.
First, it's what you've talked about and asked me about today. It is the network. In order to be digital, in order to be connected and in order to do what we're doing today, we need a good network, and not a good network but a great network, a commercial great network that functions like a utility.
In order to be digital, public servants and Canadians need to be able to access this. It's all about the connectivity in the network, and we need to make sure that we have one of the best, because it is being stressed each and every day. We have to deal with the legacy stuff we inherited, fix it, replace it, modernize it and move to simplified, standardized, software-defined zero trust networks moving forward. That's job one.
Job two is the collaboration tools and things like Microsoft Teams, Office 365 and Zoom to make sure that public servants have the tools they need. When we were created eight years ago, it was about email. It's not about email anymore. It's about Dropbox. It's about OneDrive. It's about cloud. People interact differently.
If you talk to the younger generation, you'll know that they don't send emails. They wouldn't know what emails are. We need to make sure that we give them the tools they need to be able to do their job. That includes voice-over-Internet. That includes video.
These things are collapsing, and we need to give them the tools they need. The inspectors who are out walking the field need connectivity. They need access on mobile devices so they can do their jobs. We need to equip the public service with the tools they need to serve Canadians.
Finally, with respect, it was said that SSC was all about closing data centres. No, it's not. We are going to close data centres. We did a record number last year, and I will keep closing them, but as Marc said earlier, it's about the health of the applications in there. I don't want to close a data centre and move crappy applications. We want to move good applications. It doesn't make any sense to take an old, outdated application and move it into the cloud. It's still an old, outdated application.
We will close data centres. We want to move them to end state, because that responds to MP Green's question on no single points of failure and redundancy. Those data centres have redundancy built into them. If one goes down, it goes to the other. We have to focus on what the departments do, and that's the health of their applications moving forward.
Those are the three areas. They served us very well through COVID. They accelerated what we were doing. We continue to believe that those are the right things, and we want to do those, as the minister said, in utilizing an enterprise approach.
No more negotiating with 42 departments. We work with the OCIO to set standards. We ask for their guidance and direction and then we do it, and we do it in a way that works. We create a process for exemptions when the enterprise approach doesn't work; I don't want to leave anybody with the impression that it's a one-size-fits-all all the time. As was said, we don't want to be reliant on one vendor for everything, and we know that one solution will not always work for all departments. We need to start with the common and then move to exceptions.