The meeting was attended by the head of the national digital system, Shira Lev Ami; Shirley Ivan, Chief Information Security and Technology Officer for the Government of Canada; Andrew Sinskin and Alyssa Ross of Statistics Canada; Keren Bar-Lev, government CTO and director of the CCoE, and over 80 cloud leaders and experts who are members of the Nimbus CCoE community.
The purpose of the meeting was to hear about the process of moving to the cloud of a large office in the Canadian government, receiving important highlights, presenting challenges and solutions and learning from the process.
Sharing Canada’s journey to the cloud with the Nimbus community contributes to learning the process, drawing conclusions, knowing the challenges and exposure to possible solutions and different ways to move to the cloud.
At the meeting, Andrew Sinskin and Alicia Ross from the Central Bureau of Statistics presented the highlights of the process, which led to the migration of over 1,300 servers, 500 products, 700 applications, 600 terabytes of storage and 6,000 virtual desktops. The process, which started with four employees, grew to an operation of about 150 employees, among them office workers who were invested in training courses in order to update knowledge for a cloud environment, outsourcing employees and specialist services of the cloud provider.
In the process, which was planned to last about a year but actually took about two years, the employees learned the importance of performing penetration tests starting from the early stages of the process; The importance of planning time in a hybrid transition; the importance of cleaning the file server, in order to ensure a faster and more efficient transfer of storage to the cloud; integration of secure development processes; the importance of developing infrastructure as a code (IAC) to optimize environmental restoration processes; as well as setting up environments on demand, with the aim of enhancing the utilization of cloud capabilities. The need to change the thinking and management patterns in the worlds of financial management (FinOps) was emphasized, among other things in building processes, reports and special teams; in automation processes; In changing the traditional way of working of the teams and the importance of DevOps methodologies.
One of the most important principles presented is cloud governance, the importance of cooperation with business teams and the change and adaptation of people and processes, where the key is gaining the trust of business customers and making information accessible.
This meeting opens the door to worldwide collaborations in the field, open dialogue, learning and sharing, which can contribute to the Israeli government’s journey to the cloud.
The director of the Nimbus CCoE community would like to thank the head of the national digital system, Shira Lev Ami; To Andrew, Shirley and Alicia from the Central Bureau of Statistics of the Government of Canada for sharing, presenting and being willing to reflect the process of the journey to the cloud, the challenges and the solutions; To all members of the Nimbus CCoE community and to all those present at the meeting.
To watch the full session: