Cloud in general speeds up the process. For example, if you had to ensure that you had a large enough infrastructure capacity to support 30 million users on a flick of a switch, you really would not be able to do that. Most organizations, including the Government of Canada, may not have enough capacity or servers to service that spike in usage so quickly. Even at an accelerated pace of procurement you have to decide what you are going to procure, you have to order it, then it gets delivered, then you have to install it. All those things take time in a private sector context and in the public sector it may take even longer.
At the time of the pandemic there was also a limited amount of tech supplies available. It was a constrained environment. Amazon, our parent company, invented the cloud because of those challenges. As the company was trying to innovate and build things more quickly and grow, they kept running into the same kind of capacity issues over and over again. As Amazon worked to try to solve that problem for our company and our own usage, that's actually where the cloud business was born; it was that ability to allow others to scale quickly and grow quickly to reach the capacity or scale that they needed in a short amount of time.
This actually is a perfect use case for when you would want to use cloud.