The Government of Canada has an existing and growing requirement for improved secure remote access capabilities. An effective, reliable SRA capability provides several benefits, including:
increased teleworking, which reduces government office space costs and increases employment opportunities for persons with disabilities, who may not be able to physically commute to traditional office locations;
improved client service by enabling support staff to respond to emergencies without having to return to the office, thus improving response time, staff efficiency and presenting the public service as a more desirable employer;
a point of presence in remote communities where a traditional office is not cost effective;
increased efficiencies and effectiveness for field employees, providing remote access to data while on field site visits are required instead of having to return to their offices, retrieve additional data as required and make another site visit;
ability for staff to connect to the infrastructure from a government-furnished equipment (GFE) laptop while travelling on GC business; and
access to departmental IT services for GC workers on mobile platforms (e.g. cars, ships).
In addition, SSC drivers for improving secure remote access are to consolidate the data centres; harmonize the equipment; and, comply with Policy and Standards Enforcement of the Government of Canada.
Accordingly, Canada has embarked upon an initiative to upgrade and consolidate its Secure Remote Access capabilities in support of the Departmental Security Management directive, Policy on Government Security and Government of Canada Strategic Plan for Information Management and Information Technology 2017 to 2021.
Currently, Shared Services Canada (SSC) manages a patchwork of legacy, departmentally developed or contracted SRA services, including the Government of Canada Secure Remote Access outsourced managed service.
The existing SRA environment is not fully integrated and does not have the capacity to provide the full scope of log collection, analytics and processing required in meeting the CCCSs mandate of providing timely and accurate information to support threat detection and security incident response for this service. While many current remote access gateways are hosted in legacy data centres, SSC’s vision is to consolidate and standardize services into SSC managed Enterprise Data Centres (EDCs) as much as possible.
This procurement is subject to the National Security Exception and is, therefore, excluded from all of the obligations of the trade agreements.
In 2016, SSC adopted a new system called Procure-to-Pay (P2P) to electronically manage procurement to payment processes. P2P integrates accounts payable and procurement processes, allows for automated work routing and email notifications, provides end-to-end electronic approvals and enables SSC to move towards paperless processing.
SSC’s suppliers will be required to interface with the SSC P2P portal for this Request for Information.
Suppliers can register in the SSC P2P portal in order to:
view and access solicitations from SSC;
submit a bid to a solicitation;
receive updates and amendments regarding solicitations;
be awarded contracts and receive contract amendments;
receive electronic Purchase Orders; and
submit invoices and receive payment status updates.To register, please go to https://sscp2pspc.ssc-spc.gc.ca and click “Register Now”.
If you have any questions regarding registering for P2P, please email: r••••••••@••••••.ca,
Please note that information on any amendments made to this RFI are viewable in the P2P solicitation.
