Shared Services Canada (SSC): EDC Gatineau

The EDC Gatineau facility is one of four modern “Enterprise Data Centres” (EDCs) operated by Shared Services Canada as part of the Government of Canada’s data-centre consolidation strategy. These facilities support hosting of federal applications and data under a hybrid-hosting model and serve partner departments across government. 

EDC Gatineau is designed to provide high-availability, secure, and scalable infrastructure to meet the digital-services demands of Canadians. Its location in Gatineau, Québec offers proximity to the Ottawa region (Canada’s federal government hub) while benefiting from the region’s stable infrastructure, power grid, and connectivity ecosystem.

As a component of SSC’s enterprise hosting model, EDC Gatineau is aligned with the federal mandate to modernize IT infrastructure, improve service delivery, increase resilience and reduce environmental footprint. 

⚙️ Facility Highlights

• The facility is built for continuous operation with design features allowing maintenance without disruption to IT services — electrical and mechanical systems are redundant and maintenance routines support zero downtime for hosted workloads. 
• Network connectivity: the facility supports at least two diverse external network paths to ensure connectivity redundancy. 
• The building holds or meets a minimum LEED® Silver rating (or equivalent) indicating sustainable design at the facility level. 
• Cooling and environmental features: the data centre leverages the local climate to reduce HVAC loads, including technologies such as large cooling wheels and energy-reuse systems depending on site design. 

🔐 Security & Compliance

• Access to the facility is tightly controlled: only a small number of security-cleared and skilled staff may enter, with modern physical-security controls, remote monitoring, and operational protocols to reduce human-error risk.
• The site is designed to withstand fire and certain natural-disaster events, with mechanical/electrical system switching allowing continuity of IT services even during component failure. 
• The facility meets or exceeds industry-recognized standards for availability and reliability; for example, peer SSC-facilities have achieved Tier III Gold certification from the Uptime Institute for operations and maintenance. 
• The federal Reference Architecture Document mandates that EDCs support at least the “Protected B – Medium Integrity – Medium Availability (PBMM)” security baseline, with higher levels available for classified workloads. 

🌐 Connectivity & Carrier Access

• Being in the Gatineau/Ottawa-region corridor, EDC Gatineau benefits from strong network infrastructure, fibre-diverse paths and proximity to Ottawa’s connectivity ecosystem — supporting federal-government IT demands.
• Carrier-neutral or multi-carrier access is implied by the “at least two paths” network design requirement, ensuring customers have network redundancy and choice. 
• Designed to host mixed workloads including large enterprise and government systems, the facility supports hybrid-cloud and multisite architectures consistent with SSC’s hosting strategy

💼 Who It Serves

• Federal government departments and agencies requiring secure, compliant, high-availability hosting within Canada and aligned with Canadian data-sovereignty requirements.
• Large enterprise workloads, mission-critical applications, and digital-service platforms with continuity, redundancy, and resilience needs.
• Cloud services, private-cloud and hybrid-cloud deployments that must operate in a certified federal-data-centre environment.
• Disaster-recovery or business-continuity implementations within the government of Canada’s consolidation framework, leveraging the EDC framework to support inter-site redundancy.