Digital Move For Public Service Commission To Data Centre Plagued By Problems

OTTAWA — A digital move for the Public Service Commission that was supposed to save time and money as part of a larger government plan appears to have actually cost time and effort after services failed.

 

The details are outlined in an undated briefing note to the president of Shared Services Canada, the government's super-IT department, ahead of a meeting with commission officials in mid-May.

 

Things were so bad for the commission, and at least six applications running so slowly, that it was "having a critical impact on business."

 

The problems came after the commission had its systems moved from a data centre in the heart of the national capital to one on a military base north of Toronto.

 

Shared Services Canada did not respond to a request for comment about the document, and whether this was an isolated case.

 

The previous Conservative government created the super-IT department in 2011 with the aim of consolidating data centres and email systems, saying it would save the government millions annually by streamlining infrastructure and eliminating duplication.

 

It was also designed to eliminate aging infrastructure and cut down on the number of vulnerabilities in the system that could give malicious hackers an easy way into government networks.

 

But projects like the email system have had hiccups, departments have been hesitant to have their email moved to the new platform, and others have complained about the response time of applications needed to do their jobs.

 

It is now left to the incoming Liberal government to continue to manage the IT overhaul and continue the modernization of the public service — hiccups and all.

 

That overhaul includes consolidating 485 data centres into just seven, with one of them being at CFB Borden north of Toronto.

 

In late February, the Public Service Commission had its digital infrastructure moved to the Borden data centre from one in downtown Ottawa.

 

The briefing note to the then-president of Shared Services Canada says the commission "experienced multiple outages" of their system along with "immediate, ongoing degradation in application performance."

 

The reason? First, there was the physical distance: Borden was farther from the commission's downtown Ottawa office, meaning it simply took longer for information to travel between the servers and front-line workers.

 

Second, there were physical problems with the infrastructure. A cable was cut — the briefing note doesn't explain why. Servers failed and equipment designed to run the network failed to perform to specification — again, no explanation was given in the document.

 

Workers tried to keep everything running, but the cost was weakened digital security. The briefing note says the digital firewall designed to protect against malicious actors was "running without high availability."

 

The briefing note doesn't say whether there were any unauthorized intrusions into the system.