Canada Test 10
5 min40 WPM required284 words
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Shared Services Canada was established in 2011 to consolidate and standardise the information technology infrastructure services used by federal departments and agencies, including email, data centres, networks, and end-user devices, with the goal of reducing costs, improving security, and increasing the reliability of the technology platforms on which federal programs and services depend. The email migration initiative consolidated dozens of separate departmental email systems onto a smaller number of secure shared platforms, reducing the fragmentation that had resulted in inconsistent security standards and high aggregate maintenance costs across the federal IT landscape. Data centre consolidation, which involved transitioning departmental computing workloads from a large number of aging departmental server rooms to a smaller number of modern enterprise data centres operated or contracted by SSC, aimed to improve energy efficiency, physical security, disaster recovery capability, and the cost-effectiveness of computing infrastructure. Network services provided by SSC give federal employees secure connectivity between government buildings, remote access capabilities for those working outside the office, and the internet connectivity required to access cloud-hosted services and to communicate with citizens and partners. The relationship between SSC and its federal client departments has been a subject of ongoing management attention, as the centralisation of IT services required departments to cede control over infrastructure that they previously managed themselves, creating friction when SSC's service delivery timelines or technical choices did not align with departmental operational needs. Cloud adoption has become an increasingly important element of SSC's service portfolio, with the development of a secure government cloud framework enabling departments to use commercial cloud services for appropriate workloads while maintaining compliance with the Treasury Board's security and data residency policies that govern how sensitive federal information may be stored and processed.