Public Accounts committee  Again, it's a wonderful question, but as the chief information officer of Canada, that's not within my purview. I will make sure that I go back to our greening government folks, who will have a very good answer for you on that. Thank you.

Public Accounts committee  The Government of Canada is migrating systems and information to the cloud for a couple of the reasons I outlined. One is it gives us speed and agility. We've seen some of the challenges we've had in meeting service levels to Canadians. Our hope is that we create digital environments that are elastic and changeable in a different way from some of our old, more monolithic systems, if I can use that word.

Public Accounts committee  Yes. It's the speed of implementing new projects, and also the speed of changing systems. Imagine introducing a new policy or program. Some of the exceptional things that were done throughout COVID were done in ways that were extraordinary. In a normal organization, where you have a good cloud footprint, you're able to stand up and build things in a much quicker fashion than in our traditional environment.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you for the question. In fact it is interesting because while the Auditor General's office was doing their assessment, a lot of work was under way. I walked you through some of the items. We had updated our GC CSEMP, our roles and responsibilities, and our policy guidance around Canadians' information in the cloud.

Public Accounts committee  We're actually just in the process. At the beginning of April all of the departments across government will be sending in their annual plans on service and digital. It would be good for us to check those to make sure they have implemented within their plans some of the guidance we've been providing.

Public Accounts committee  That's the work we're undertaking right now, and it's not a one-to-one answer, because there is a cost and a benefit to speed, and there's a cost with buying computing from Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure versus having all of the infrastructure that Sony needs to put in place to physically operate a facility with servers and all the things that we need to host on premise.

Public Accounts committee  Just to make a point of clarification, it's 10% of systems, not data. It's a little different.

Public Accounts committee  No, no, that's okay, but it's important that nuance. I think we can continue course and speed. We have actually quite aggressively moved on the Auditor General's findings already, as I outlined in some of my remarks, and we will continue to tighten things as we move along. There is always, as part of putting a new system into production, i.e., into the cloud, a released production activity list you go through to make sure that things have been met.

Public Accounts committee  I'll take that one and then Rajiv can add something if he wants to. The reason we're shifting from cloud-first to cloud-smart, first of all, is that using the cloud allows us to stand things up very quickly. Where we would take potentially months to stand up an environment in which we can start building a new system for Canadians or migrating a new system for Canadians, we can do that in hours or days in cloud, so there's a huge opportunity to move more quickly to deliver service to Canadians.

Public Accounts committee  That would be something we'd be happy to share.

Public Accounts committee  I think we are experiencing things that are very similar to what other organizations do at this stage of our maturity. We are less than 10% in the cloud. I think we are adopting what are standard best practices, and I think we are learning unfortunately a lot of the same lessons that organizations learn, which is....

Public Accounts committee  Not that I'm aware of, but I might ask my colleague, who has been around the table a little longer, if there was an international benchmark done. There is not one that I'm aware of.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, and members of the committee. This is my first time appearing at this committee. I've met some of you, but for the others, I'm pleased to be here today. I've been 21 months in government, having spent about 30 years in the private sector before that so I'm still in my “firsts” as I go through all of these different exercises.

Government Operations committee  I'll speak to that from a technology perspective. I think your point that there has been investment in the public service resonates with me, for sure. Part of what we're focused on from a digital government perspective is ensuring that the tools we provide all public servants are modern and that we provide the opportunity for Canadians to be able to use them and serve themselves as they see fit, in a digital way.

Government Operations committee  Thank you, Minister. To your point, digital ambition really outlines the plan for government. It's available publicly on canada.ca. That will allow us to deliver government in a digital age. Canadians have come to expect that. That accelerated particularly during COVID, and that's not changing.