GAFAM watches over your Hydro-Québec data

Hydro-Québec awards nearly $40M in contracts to American multinationals to host its data.

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Hydro-Québec currently does business with four data hosting providers, namely AWS, Microsoft (Azure), Google (Google Cloud Platform) and VMware (VMware Cloud Platform on AWS).

The amounts paid to these multinationals have exploded since 2019, going from $1.4 million in 2019 to $34.6 million last year. As of June 30, 2024, Hydro-Québec had already spent $20 million on cloud hosting services.

Hydro cannot detail the amounts paid to each supplier for each of the periods covered, because this is commercial information and therefore confidential.

These suppliers host Hydro-Québec data in data centers located in Montreal, Quebec and Toronto, according to a response to an access to information request made by The Journal.

Unable to identify a customer

It is difficult to know what types of data are hosted by Microsoft, Google and Amazon, but Hydro-Québec assures that they do not allow the identification of a customer. “Personal information is hosted directly on our servers. Sensitive data concerning our electrical mission is hosted in accordance with the reliability standards of NERC (North American Electric Reliability Corporation),” the state company simply responds.

“Like many large organizations, Hydro-Québec has chosen to move towards cloud computing. The reasons which explain this choice are numerous. The fact of no longer having to set up and maintain these infrastructures constitutes a significant advantage in terms of investment and allocation of our efforts,” explains François Ramsay, of Hydro-Québec.

“Cloud computing makes it possible to increase or reduce the level of service depending on our needs. This avoids having to equip yourself with oversized infrastructure that is only required at certain specific times. In addition, it allows us to use collaborative work tools which increase the efficiency of our teams,” he adds.

These different reasons, he says, explain the increase in the use of cloud hosting services and the increasing costs.

Other data storage solutions, such as the use of servers, also come with costs, without the advantages offered by cloud computing, he wants to point out.

Popular GAFAMs

Note that the use of cloud computing is increasingly popular among governments and businesses. The Legault government, which said in 2019 that it wanted 80% of government data to be hosted in the cloud by companies like Amazon, Google or Microsoft, recently decided to allow Quebecers’ medical data to be hosted on servers abroad. , as part of its reform to digitize the health network.

Total amounts spent by Hydro-Québec for data hosting

• 2019: 1,4 million $
• 2020: 4,5 millions $
• 2021: 8,8 millions $
• 2022: 20,6 millions$
• 2023: 34,6 millions $
• 2024: $20 million (as of June 30)