Shared Services Canada launches industry consultation on the Government of Canada’s Cloud and Hosting Strategy
Shared Services Canada has launched industry consultations on the Government of Canada’s new Cloud and Hosting Strategy.
The stated objective of the strategy is to provide its 43 client departments and agencies with a “reliable and sustainable hosting ecosystem where workloads can be transferred from any hosting location without impacting operations and where enterprise application data can be transferred across GC infrastructure at speed and scale.”
Overview
As part of the plan, future hosting roadmaps will be developed to outline how a multi-cloud/hybrid model for hosting will allow departments to optimize where they put their applications and workloads.
The proposed options are:
- Enterprise Data Centres – Hosted on-prem by SSC.
- Multiple Public Clouds – Hosted by Cloud Service Providers.
- Private Cloud – Hosted within EDCs.
- EDGE Computing – Locally Hosted by SSC of CSPs.
- Emerging Hosting Opportunities – (e.g., GC PaaS)
A new Hosting Procurement system will be developed to replace the current Cloud Framework Agreement which will be put into ‘life support mode.’
This procurement system will include:
- A mandatory method of supply for Public Cloud IaaS and native PaaS for the GC that will include a limited number of hyperscalers, contracts with a disclosed work allocation method between cloud providers and socio-economic measures.
- A mandatory method of supply for public cloud for PaaS for the GC that is open to niche and innovative solutions.
- A dedicated vehicle for public cloud SaaS CSPs that addresses GC wide requirements, and cloud expertise programs for niche services.
- PISA 2.O which will include ‘as-a-service’ options.
- Vendor managed services delivered by a limited number of CSPs that address GC wide requirements.
- A dedicated vehicle for specialize professional services that will provide a mandatory method of supply for specialized training and advisory services. This will include two streams; OEM specific and generic services.
At this time several questions remain unanswered such as what will happen to current contracts with CSPs and what will happen to any workload migrations currently under consideration by departments.
SSC has promised to engage vendors regularly as this new strategy develops.