By Lisa Carroll, Canadian Public Sector Lead, Microsoft
To kick off 2021, Microsoft Canada hosted the inaugural Canada Public Sector Forum: Foundations for Economic Recovery, an intimate two-day event that brought together senior executives from across the public sector for an engaging discussion with global thought leaders. On day one, I sat down with Secretary Madeleine Albright, former United States Secretary of State, and Dr. Julia Glidden, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector, for a conversation that explored the international landscape and the issues facing the world today. To follow, day two focused on cybersecurity and the evolving threats to nation states, where I was joined by two of Canada’s foremost experts in cybersecurity, Dave McMahon, Chief Executive Officer of Clairvoyance Cyber Corp, and John Hewie, Microsoft Canada’s National Security Officer.
Digital Transformation in Canada
Despite the challenges of 2020, it was a year of significant growth and transformation across Canada’s public sector. The biggest enabler of this successful rapid response to COVID-19, was a change in mindset across the country. For the first time, the risk of doing nothing in the public sector was suddenly greater than the risk of doing something. Everything had to be re-imagined. The accelerated digital transformation that followed unleashed incredible innovation and ushered in broader adoption of cloud computing and the realization that data and AI are a national asset. With this new mindset, it is more important than ever that the public and private sectors work together to shrink the digital divide to ensure all citizens, no matter where they live in Canada, have access to fundamental resources like broadband and digital skills training to succeed in today’s innovation economy.
Canada on the Global Stage
As new technology becomes ubiquitous, it is imperative that policy makers think outside the box and to the future, rather than regulate within the historical 20th century paradigms. With cloud becoming critical government infrastructure and data considered “the new oil,” governments will soon look to pre-purchase cloud computing capacity in the way they currently have oil reserves.
This is compounded by the fact that the world is facing a pivotal point in history. The international agenda continues to be dominated by the pandemic and its economic fallout, threats to democracy, the staggering implications of climate change and heightened concerns of cyber–attacks. And while these are daunting and distinct problems, the one thing they have in common is that they do not respect borders. These challenges cannot be tackled by any one country acting alone, and as a recognized leader in international diplomacy, Canada has an important role to play in fostering international cooperation.
In this new era of remote work, there are incredible new opportunities to connect and create ad hoc organizations that are multinational and multilateral, with a purpose of problem solving and without necessitating travel. And with a focus on global economic recovery, international collaboration between governments, the private sector and multilateral institutions will be critical to ensuring advanced technologies are used in a responsible, sustainable, inclusive and ethical way. Canada’s commitment to the Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace and its leadership in creating international consensus on divisive issues, will be fundamental in shaping the rules of engagement.
Cybersecurity is Paramount
These multilateral partnerships – both internationally and within Canada between government, industry and academia, are critical when it comes to cybersecurity. The pandemic and US election have demonstrated that cybercriminals and state sponsored actors will continue to take any and every opportunity to exploit international digital infrastructure. As we saw recently with a large scale cyberattack, it is more important than ever that senior government executives understand the cybersecurity challenges Canada faces and what can be done to help mitigate a breach and protect their departments, data and people. This is no longer just an issue for the IT department to contend with.
Cyber threats are increasingly more agile and sophisticated. As a global technology company, Microsoft has access to, and is able to, process a massive amount of signals from running cloud services in 1.2 billion end points around the world, offering tremendous insights on trends. For example, when the World Health Organization named the novel coronavirus COVID-19 on February 11, 2020, Microsoft sensors started detecting an 11–fold increase in COVID-19 themed lures in phishing attacks in less than a week. This crystalized how evolved the cybercrime industrial base has become.
With government departments and agencies becoming more and more interconnected, the public sector is more exposed to new and unexpected attack vectors – with the most likely being a sideways attack from an adjacent sector, fueled by phishing or an information-based threat.
The evolving nature of cyber threats, including the use of misinformation and propaganda, has created the need for a more diverse and inclusive workforce within the cybersecurity space. There is a demand for people with background in the social sciences; broadening the skill set beyond engineering and computer science will generate greater gender and cultural balance but also cultivate a more diverse set of opinions, backgrounds and expertise.
The Road Ahead
While many of the digital solutions adopted by Canada’s public sector in 2020 were out of necessity, the changes put in place will continue to provide a more effective way of delivering critical services to citizens in a post-COVID-19 world. By embracing a tech intense mindset that accepts risk, the Government of Canada demonstrated how agile it truly can be. To help these services stay nimble, Microsoft will continue to partner with government organizations across the country to provide training, best practices, technology and the infrastructure implementations needed to enable remote government workers and remote citizen services.
