Connectivity

To realize the vision of a Digital Government, the Government of Canada must deliver end to end digital services to public servants and Canadian citizens. A simple, agile, robust, efficient, reliable, and appropriately secured network infrastructure is key to providing connectivity that enables a digital government.

Shared Services Canada was created to provide integrated and reliable digital solutions to public servants for the delivery of government services to Canadians. The department is responsible for providing infrastructure, including network services, to more than 400,000 users across Government of Canada Departments and Agencies.

As part of its ongoing modernization efforts, Shared Services Canada is working to consolidate, standardize, simplify and modernize connectivity across the Government of Canada.

A vision for the future

Network security is more important than ever as Canadians access more and more programs and services online. Protecting the Government’s IT infrastructure from vulnerabilities and responding to cyber security related attacks is critical to the safety and security of Canadians’ data and services provided by the GC.

To effectively deliver services to Canadians, GC users depend on fast, appropriately secured and reliable networks and expect to be able to connect to services from anywhere, at any time, regardless of the demand and circumstances. With the growth of Cloud-based services across the GC, ubiquitous access to appropriately secured and high quality network services has become even more important.

With employees working part of the time from home and part of the time in a GC office, the increased need for secure remote access and new technology trends have changed the profile of the GC networks. These factors coupled with the migration towards software-defined networking and improved wireless technology, have shifted how SSC delivers and secures its connectivity services. A modernized approach, leveraging software-defined infrastructure and artificial intelligence (AI), provides both improved manageability and performance to enable the GC’s cloud adoption strategy.

Enterprise Network and Security Strategy

To address the government’s ambitious digital agenda, SSC has developed a modern GC Enterprise Network and Security Strategy. The focus is to increase network, cloud and mobile access and ensure agile service delivery to our partners. Key to our modernization efforts is the move towards open standards, which open up competition to a multitude of networking vendors, increasing competition and reducing reliance on any one vendor.