Canada clears up its cloud strategy

Government is overspending on IT, yet productivity growth has declined -- and it's reaching a crisis point during this period of fiscal restraint. As Canada's CIO looks to move away from infrastructure and focus on developing services instead, new opportunities such as cloud computing are coming to the fore.

The business case for cloud computing comes down to underutilized capacity, said Jirka Danek, CTO of Public Works and Government Services Canada (PWGSC), during the Public Sector CIO Forum hosted by Insight Information in Toronto last month.

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Government is overspending on IT, yet productivity growth has declined -- and it's reaching a crisis point during this period of fiscal restraint. As Canada's CIO looks to move away from infrastructure and focus on developing services instead, new opportunities such as cloud computing are coming to the fore.

The business case for cloud computing comes down to underutilized capacity, said Jirka Danek, CTO of Public Works and Government Services Canada (PWGSC), during the Public Sector CIO Forum hosted by Insight Information in Toronto last month.

There are 325,000 employees in federal government, 140 departments (all with their own CIO), 124 networks and 144 data centres across the country that he knows of. And 120,000 Wintel and Unix servers use less than 10 per cent of their capacity. "To make matters worse, 40 per cent of IT professionals are eligible for retirement in next five years," he said. "So we have to leverage the private sector a lot more."

The Treasury Board of Canada has obtained agreement across departments on the language and definitions for cloud computing and received endorsement for the Government of Canada's cloud computing roadmap -- one that can be validated with countries such as the U.S., the U.K., Australia and New Zealand.

Essentially, cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. Five essential cloud characteristics include on-demand self-service, ubiquitous network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity and measured service. "Departments don't have to buy our services," said Danek. "We have to demonstrate cost of ownership."

Cloud computing service models range from software as a service (SaaS), to platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Deployment models include public clouds (available to the general public, like Amazon), private clouds (operated solely for an organization), hybrid clouds (two or more clouds, unique but bound together by standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability) and community clouds (shared by several organizations that have shared concerns).

So far, they've finalized a security architecture, said Danek, and are now offering a community cloud for pay, pension, CampusDirect, GC Intranet and Canada.gc.ca. Short-term goals are to use SaaS for internal collaboration (such as GCPedia, GCConnex and GCForum), PaaS for commoditized Web hosting and IaaS for virtual storage and computing services. Long term, SaaS will be used for virtual offices, collaboration and federated management and directories. PaaS will be used for cloud-based application and database hosting, on-demand services and process automation, and IaaS will be used for departmental private and public cloud peering.

Cloud computing is easy and fast to deploy, you pay only for what you use and you get the latest functionality in a more standardized IT environment. On the other hand, challenges -- at least perceived ones -- include security, performance, availability and regulatory requirements. "The Patriot Act is a key concern," said Danek. But there's a need to address challenges, because they're keeping government from innovation.