Government Operations committee  With regard to the network, there is ongoing monitoring and oversight by a combination of CSE and SSC. With regard to other media, including paper, etc., employees are trained and are provided guidance. As well, we expect the access to information and privacy groups within departments to be monitoring and the employees to self-report.

Government Operations committee  I guess I would say there are two parts. We've increased the technological capacity for employees to work securely and remotely by increasing secure remote access and access to the VPN and by, in some instances, augmenting the capacity around things like Microsoft Office 365, which is up to protected B.

Government Operations committee  I believe the measure the member brought up is more within the purview of the comptroller general. Perhaps Ms. Owens could talk about workspaces. As far as telework is concerned, I believe we have seen a big increase in telework capacity. This practice already exists in many organizations outside of government.

Government Operations committee  Yes, certainly. However, the number of remote connections does not necessarily equate to the number of people who are at work. That said, on a daily basis, there are approximately 150,000 simultaneous connections to the secure network access system. Again, this is not an exact figure, because a number of public servants work outside peak hours.

Government Operations committee  I don't have the exact numbers. Minister Murray will appear before the committee with officials from Shared Services Canada in a few weeks, I believe. They will be able to give you some numbers and more details. Please note that a number of public servants already had tablets to be able to telework.

Government Operations committee  Sure. I might need to get back to you on exact numbers on this. The applications are generally run out of departments. These applications are being used for all sorts of different things and tasks. We track overall application health, and we can certainly return with more information on the overall application health.

Government Operations committee  Not off the top of my head.

Government Operations committee  That's what we talked about regarding core and at-risk services in response to an earlier question. As we mentioned, we are now conducting an application health review. This involves large systems that are at risk. We have just set up a deputy minister committee and started working on the planning process with the minister.

Government Operations committee  We would be able to provide that information. There is an application that departments use to give us information on the health of their applications.

Government Operations committee  The minister's mandate letter does talk about “core and at-risk”. There is no formal definition in policy, but this could generally be understood as being systems that support significant and important services and systems that are aging, as a result of which we could potentially have outages, or we might have a limited capacity to update them and meet policy objectives because of the aging systems.

Government Operations committee  Right now I would identify that we're in the planning stage. We have information around application portfolio help. I wouldn't want to give the impression that we don't have a line of sight at all around some of the systems. System applications fall within departments, so they have the primary line of sight.

Government Operations committee  I think the minister said it quite eloquently. Essentially, open government is about broader collaboration between the government, civil societies and Canadians. It includes elements of open information. Work has been done, for example, under the access to information regime to have more proactive publication.