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Tax and Revenue Management

Canada revenue CIO highlights virtualisation

By Johanna Morden | 14 March 2011

Virtualisation is the key to bridging geographical boundaries, cost containment and securing revenue information, Peter Poulin, CIO of the Canada Revenue Agency, told FutureGov Asia Pacific.

Canada covers an area of over nine million square kilometres, encompassing ten provinces and three territories.

This large geographical scope is the main challenge that the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) faces in its daily operations.

The CRA manages 500 sites all over the country, most of them of small sizes.

“The cost of keeping a server there and have staff to go to the place to manage the server is very expensive, so we eliminated the cost by virtualising all of our servers,” said Poulin.

“Now all small sites run in our data centre, leveraging the network to represent the interface end user,” he added.

Five years ago, the CRA initiated a big-bang approach to visualisation, where the plan was to eliminate all the servers in the country.

CRA conducted a massive project to eliminate unnecessary servers and consolidate existing ones into one data centre.

Server virtualisation has been beneficial to the CRA.

Poulin said costs were reduced by decreasing the number of staff needed to support the servers, and by actually eliminating servers that are not being used optimally.

“When you virtualise you use all capacity, there’s no waste in the amount of computing power you dedicate to that site and you save on labour,” he said.

There was also an improvement in data security, as all information collected by the CRA is stored in only one data centre. In the past, data was distributed into local servers or desktops.

Agility in the CRA’s IT infrastructure was also enhanced in that application changes in the data centre are made available to all desktops connected to it, whether running in a virtual environment or not.

There is no more need to install or update applications to every server individually, making the process less time consuming.

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