FSRA is a new, independent regulatory agency established by legislation which came into force in June 2017 to improve consumer and pension plan beneficiary protections in Ontario.
When fully operational, FSRA will be an innovative, self-funded regulator capable of responding to the dynamic pace of change in the marketplace and industry and in consumer expectations. It will regulate many sectors that are important to Ontario consumers and pension plan beneficiaries, including property and casualty insurance; life and health insurance; credit unions and caisses populaires; loan and trust companies; mortgage brokers; health service providers (related to auto insurance); and pension plan administrators.
Working closely with the Ministry of Finance, Financial Services Commission of Ontario (“FSCO”), and Deposit Insurance Corporation of Ontario (“DICO”), FSRA developed and continues to refine and act on a transition plan to assume regulatory functions currently delivered by FSCO and the prudential oversight function from DICO, with a target date of April 2019. As described in FSRA’s April 2018 Progress Report (http://www.fsrao.ca/en/board-of-directors-progress-report), this work is well underway and continues to evolve.
A part of this transition program, FSRA is looking to improve its information technology capabilities, including better, more secure and more resilient technology infrastructure. More specifically, FSRA is looking to build a new, co-located data centre (“New Data Centre”) that will fully replicate technology services provided from the existing FSCO data centre, creating a fully redundant, geographically separated environment. The New Data Centre will be hosted at Government of Ontario Guelph Data Centre, or in a similar commercially available data centre, and will become the primary FSRA production environment, with the current FSCO data centre (“Existing Data Centre”) fulfilling the disaster recovery (“DR”) requirement.
To support this project, FSRA is looking to procure the following:
- Infrastructure equipment required for the build of the New Data Centre, including hardware, software, and maintenance and support as per the Bill of Material attached as Annex B;
- System integration services, including:
- Analysis of the Existing Data Centre in order to prepare for data centre replication architecture and design;
- Implementation of newly acquired equipment in a co-location data centre facility, including infrastructure installation and configuration, connectivity to the Existing Data Centre, replication between the two data centres, and launch of the new infrastructure platform in production;
- DR planning and implementation;
- Knowledge transfer and Change Management; and
- Post-implementation support and assistance.
