Public Accounts committee  It is the policy. I don't think it's a law. It's a policy that in fact falls under Catherine's authority.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for your invitation. I am pleased to be here today, accompanied by Costas Theophilos, director general of Cloud Product Management and Services, to address any questions the committee may have with respect to the Auditor Genera

Government Operations committee  Thank you. Where we are in testing is that NextGen is finishing testing viability this spring. We have a couple of months of work to go. We are doing this with five pilot departments in a simulation. We are doing this with Indigenous Services Canada, Crown-Indigenous Relations,

Government Operations committee  Thank you very much. When Shared Services Canada was created back in 2012, we had 720 data centres. We have since closed 332, and 69 should be closed by the end of this fiscal year. By next week, we should be at around 400 closed, leaving 263. The trajectory is to consolidate

Government Operations committee  Thank you for the question. That's a difficult one, because we need to modernize at the same time, and I'm not totally in control of that. We have to do this with the partner departments, and it depends on the agenda. We need to do this while maintaining the service at the same

Government Operations committee  No, we will have fewer going forward, because the way to provide reliability to manage cost and optimize is to reduce the footprint and eliminate a number of these small sites. Right now, if you were to look at the stats, reliability in the Government of Canada infrastructure is

Government Operations committee  Thank you for the question. We are transferring back from Shared Services Canada the amount of money that we had been provided to support CBSA for processing their transactions on what we call the “mainframe”, which is our supercomputer to manage transactions for CBSA. Because

Government Operations committee  Thank you, Minister. Every major procurement we process at Shared Services Canada about technologies goes through what we call the supply integrity chain review. We do not start by saying that we don't do business with this business or this technology. We go through the process

Government Operations committee  In fact, these are the licences that one has to pay for so that each of the employees can have access to basic telecommunication tools, such as emails or Teams. What is unpredictable is that each federal department is going to have new programs and new activities and is going to

Government Operations committee  Yes, we are testing a commercial solution, which is a tool that is used by private sector and public sector organizations across the world. We have pre-qualified four vendors that are in the top quadrant—they are the best in the world at doing this—and we are testing right now wi

Government Operations committee  I'm not sure I understand the question about movement. Is it the technical side or the selection of the vendor?

Government Operations committee  We were rolling out the Microsoft 365 suite before the pandemic. We accelerated it. This was as a result of the study of the various products that were available to create an enterprise licence and negotiations that happened. There are a couple of products on the market that pro

Government Operations committee  This is an exercise we need to do on an ongoing basis. Some licences have been procured at a certain time, and they may not be the ones we need anymore. We have to keep hygiene around the using of a licence. I think it's an excellent question. Part of managing a complex IT infras

Government Operations committee  I will take this one, Mr. Chair. We have a multi-year arrangement with Microsoft for an enterprise licence that gives us, if I remember well, 400,000 licences for the whole public service. We don't have licences by department. We manage this on behalf of the government. It's a

Government Operations committee  If I remember well, it's 400,000 that we have. I could come back on the specific number. I don't have the agreement in front of me.