Reduce costs and resources

Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computing resources as services over the internet. It eliminates the need for organizations to buy and manage resources themselves, and they only pay for what they use.

Decrease carbon footprint

For StatCan, shifting to the cloud allows the decommissioning of some 1,300 servers and the realization of numerous benefits. For instance, data centres use a lot of energy and are estimated to contribute to 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions, so the cloud is enabling StatCan to significantly reduce its environmental footprint.

Improve security

The cloud also offers improved security with the ability to monitor and address cyber risks in real time. When considering the importance of the information held by StatCan, the cloud provides the required protections. The government has established specific security controls that are applied to its cloud operations to ensure that data is not only highly available and reliable but at the level of security Canadians expect.

“A recent example of the benefits of Cloud capacity was demonstrated during the pandemic. During this unprecedented period, StatCan’s ability to provide academics, other levels of government and our policy making and service delivery colleagues would simply have been impossible without the investments in Cloud applications, data storage and tools.”

Overcoming challenges

While the advantages of moving to the cloud were clear, the path to get there involved a large-scale, multi-year process and migration. Project planning was highly complex and demanded carefully designed and executed strategies to transfer exceptionally large amounts of data from the legacy data centres to the cloud. As well, StatCan faced other challenges, including attracting new talent and training existing personnel in how to work in this modern environment while building new, detailed operating processes from scratch. It was a massive undertaking.

Improving user access

Today, more than five years later, the benefits are clear. Canadians now have access to an increasing amount of information through the new StatsCAN app which provides:

• expert analysis
• stories
• fun facts
• visuals
• insight
• the latest information on Canada’s economy, society and environment

In addition to being greener, and more secure, cloud technologies provide StatCan with the flexibility, responsiveness and capacity needed to meet the evolving nature of statistics where data can be drawn from external sources and rapidly converted into timely, quality and integrated information for decision making.

“By taking a Cloud-based approach to our data, academics, economists and Canadians in general can quickly and efficiently find information through a modern app which provides access to data analytics, artificial intelligence, and deep learning services many of which are only available through Cloud. It has allowed us to modernize and keep pace with what our users need and expect.”