-Hi, I'm Martin Rust, the director of the Security and Policy Institute for Professional
Development, here at the University of Ottawa.
My guest this afternoon is Dave Buchanan.
Dave is the director for the federal Canadian government with a company called VCE, a great
technology company that's doing lots of work with the Canadian government.
One of the things I wanted us to talk about is technology today.
Because some of the terminology is confusing.
Certainly, technology is a big part of our lives.
We have it in our homes, in our cars, and it impacts everything we do.
But there's some things that perhaps we need to understand a little bit better.
For example, this thing called "cloud".
So, perhaps you can help us understand what is a cloud, what isn't a cloud.
-All right.
Technology today...
What feeds the devices that the average consumer uses on a day to day basis is information
stored and analyzed in a large environment called the data center.
The data center has been happily named a cloud.
A cloud can either sit in a private environment, i.e. a cloud that is provided, run and maintained
by somebody like the Canadian government.
Or a public cloud environment, when you think about something like Facebook or LinkedIn.
-Right.
-Yes.
-And so, we all actually use clouds probably on a regular basis.
We just don't necessarily think about it.
-Correct.
-And, more and more, my sense is that the devices that we use are less important.
What's more important is the cloud.
-And you can see it, this...
Technology is so consumer-driven.
When I say the devices are becoming thinner and thinner, think about the things that we
can't rip out of our children's hands, the iPad.
There's not a lot of smarts that sit in that iPad.
The smarts are actually sitting back in that data center or that private or public cloud.
-So help us understand what is a data center.
I know that the federal government has talked about having four or five hundred data centers
at the moment across Canada, and their goal is to reduce that to six or seven.
What do they mean by that?
What is that difference?
-Well, so, the Canadian government is going to consolidate massive data center environments,
small, medium, large data center environments into up to seven environments, seven environments
that contain large network environments, i.e. the plumbing, large compute environments,
i.e. the smarts, large storage environments, the virtualization of those environments,
the operating systems that sit on top of them and the platforms or applications that you
and I use on a day to day basis.
Why consolidate these things?
They are a lot more efficient run in large environments, fewer people run them, the technology
today utilizes a lot less power, and because technology is advanced to a point today that
the hardware, the stuff that looks like... in these big data centers that you see on
TV, they kind of look like computer components.
There's now been a separation between the zeros and ones or the smarts of a computer
and the hardware.
And what that enables operators of these environments to do is...
In the old days, when you wanted a new application or service on your laptop, the IT guys, say,
for example, a finance application...
We'd go back and they would configure the plumbing and the brains and where you store
this separately to enable the delivery of that service.
Today, with the separation of what we're calling a software-defined data center, you're able
to automate these processes.
So, in the old days, where a bunch of guys needed to do a lot of things for Martin to
have this finance application, today, it's literally the click of a button that triggers
that automation and that delivery of the service to you.
-So, the delivery of the service is faster, the response time is a lot faster.
Is it more secure and, if so, why?
-Yes, it is more secure.
And the reason for that is these large cloud environments are put together with what I
would call today "cloud appliances".
And because these cloud appliances are very agile, they can scale very, very quickly,
they are built very much in building blocks.
And because these building blocks are, for all intents and purposes, the same, they're
easier to secure.
-Terrific.
-Yeah.
-To that, obviously, is a big benefit and a big concern for most Canadians, as wanting
to know that their information is secure.
-Correct.
-I'm Martin Rust, the director of the Security and Policy Institute with the University of
Ottawa.
My guest today is Dave Buchanan, the director for the Canadian government with a company
called VCE.
Thanks very much, Dave.
-Thank you.