Government Operations committee  Essentially, the question is about a fundamental shift. Right now a lot of people feel they come into their office, sit down at the same desk, the same phone. These GC collaborating spaces are not that. They are a set of standard spaces where a public servant can come in, plug in their tablet, get to their network, their phone number pops up and they're able to function.

Government Operations committee  Mr. Chair, in response to the member's question, as he alluded to, cloud is just an exceptionally large data centre that is often multi-tenant and allows the vendor to be able to scale up. What is unique about the way the Government of Canada has approached cloud is that we have imposed our security requirements.

Government Operations committee  The cloud services providers are running those data centres. That would include the data in there, but again I must underscore that it's done to the standards we impose on them with respect to the storage and encryption of that data. That would include backups, the ability to restore and who would be able to unencrypt that data.

Government Operations committee  It is a mix. We have the large multinationals, Amazon web services, Microsoft Azure, to Canadian companies like ThinkOn. The key is they're subject to the same requirements. They must operate in Canada, so we are not subject to things like the Patriot Act and others. The data resides solely in Canada, and we have full ability to physically visit, inspect and verify the security claims.

Government Operations committee  The short answer is that in order to be digitally enabled you need to have access to digital tools. This means that, just like you trust when you use an electrical outlet that it's going to work, in the office place we need to have wired access points that work and we need wireless access points.

Government Operations committee  There are two parts to the answer to the member's question. The first is that we needed to move quickly, so scale and speed mattered and we looked for partners in vendors that were going to be able to do that. To move at the numbers we were dealing with—millions of Canadians logging in simultaneously on day one—had to be a no-fail.

Government Operations committee  I received offers for new technologies virtually every day. We worked with partners to try to assess those to find ones that were relevant to us. We have literally been inundated with people trying to provide new services to us and we're trying to work through all those.

Government Operations committee  Absolutely, I would be happy to do that. My apologies if I take up all of your time; just wave and I will stop. We did a ton of work here. It was truly unprecedented. It started with what we call secure remote access points, to make sure that we were doing this safely. When Mr.

Government Operations committee  Sure. It's been about $58 million all told. That's tablets and equipment to help people work at home, network upgrades, secure remote access points, specialized equipment and hardware to deal with the volumes of Canadians trying to access new benefits, and increased storage costs and computing costs to deal with those unprecedented volumes.

Government Operations committee  Thanks, Scott. In response to the question about the resources that Shared Services needs, there are a number of things. It's access to expertise, such as the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, which is constantly monitoring those things. It's access to technology in the networks and in the data centres.

Government Operations committee  I'll take a first shot at the member's question. We do not monitor how long they're on. Those are issues that the department deals with. What we do monitor is the type of traffic, the nature of it from a security point of view, to make sure they're visiting appropriate sites, the nature of the activity.

Government Operations committee  I would repeat what Scott Jones has said. Our perimeter is really world-class and is the envy of many other nations. It is constantly blocking threats, so to say there are none.... There are literally billions every day, but they don't get through. Even in those exceptionally rare cases where they do get through, they're spotted very quickly and contained.

Government Operations committee  I will turn to Scott from the CSE to round out this answer, but the reason we can say this is that we have tools that monitor the traffic, so we're able to understand, and these tools are intelligent, using artificial and other things—the firewalls—to both block and monitor what's happening.

Government Operations committee  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.

Government Operations committee  Thank you, Minister. Just briefly, in addition to what you've said, any of the personnel who work in the data centres where this data is housed are subject to the appropriate security clearance. All the data centres are monitored. The data is encrypted, so even if we did look at it, we wouldn't be able to understand what we were looking at.