Microsoft's talks this year with Shared Services Canada and the Communications Security Establishment reviewed whether sensitive data about Canadians and other confidential matters could be securely encrypted on American "cloud" services. A spokesperson for Shared Services Canada, Monika Mazur, did not respond directly when asked whether the IT agency was still considering foreign cloud services for sensitive government data, but referred to a federal document that forbids it. Some low-risk Government of Canada data already reside on American and other non-Canadian "cloud" servers, including data for web pages with the Canada.ca suffix, which provide only general information. ... no mechanism is entirely able to prevent foreign access to data ... - Shared Services Canada memo on using foreign-based cloud services for sensitive Canadian government dataOutsourcing data storage and processing to commercial cloud services eliminates the need for costly hardware or software, and can be expanded and contracted as needed. The document by Raj Thuppal, of the Cyber and IT Security unit of Shared Services Canada, says " … no mechanism is able to entirely prevent foreign access to data should legal requests be invoked."

Source: CBC News September 08, 2017 09:00 UTC