If I can, Mr. Chair, digital is not an option. It's where we host that data, whether it's a data centre that is controlled by the Government of Canada, or it's the cloud, or in between. The reality is, a lot of the work we are going to do going forward will be hybrid. We are going to leverage traditional data centres for some aspects of the business or the process, and we are going to leverage the cloud for some other aspects. All of this needs to be tightly connected.
The business case that is being done at the beginning is about how we optimally leverage the various hosting options. The cloud, as Catherine said, brings that option to scale up. If there is a peak in demand—think about the tax season or the passport season or the demand at the border—these systems can take much more demand if they are in the cloud, because they can ask for more computing. When there is a peak, we pay more, and when there is a lower demand, we pay less.
If it's run in a traditional data centre that I operate, I need to build a farm of servers to be able to be ready to take peak times, so it might not be cost-effective. When we do the business analysis of that, we also have to look at the cycle that some of these programs or services are going through.
This is when we get to figuring out what is the best digital hosting option. Sometimes, it's a bit in the cloud and a bit in a data centre. It really depends on the business and the type of operation. Catherine gave some examples. Each one has its own cycle and its own demands.
That data needs to be hosted somewhere and the application that computes that data needs to be hosted somewhere, so in each case, we're doing a business case.