Government of Quebec
Security architecture and identity and access governance, at the scale of government environments.
Within the Government of Quebec, I work primarily on cybersecurity and identity architecture files.
Scale changes everything. In a small business, an architecture decision affects a few dozen people and can be corrected in a week. In a government environment, the same decision commits thousands of users, several organisations, and regulatory obligations that are not negotiable.
Responsibilities
- Security architecture
- Identity and access governance (IAM)
- Microsoft Entra ID
- Azure
- Azure DevOps
- Incident prevention
- Incident response
- Secure solution architecture
- Modernisation of government environments
At this scale, architecture is not a technical exercise. It determines what a human error will and will not be able to cause.
Among the achievements I am proudest of are the deployment of incident prevention and response solutions, and the design of architectures that strengthen the security of government services.
That work also taught me something I reuse everywhere else: in a large organisation, the best architecture is not the most elegant one, it is the one the teams in place can actually operate and maintain.
What identity governance changes in practice
Identity as the perimeter
Network walls protect little when services are cloud-based and staff work remotely. Control shifts to who is requesting access, from which device, in what context.
Standing privilege as the main risk
A permanently active administrator account is a permanently available target. Just-in-time elevation cuts the exposure window from months to hours.
Access reviews
Rights accumulate through role changes and are almost never removed. Without periodic review, an organisation no longer knows who can do what.
Traceability
Knowing after the fact who accessed what, and when. It is what turns an incident into an investigation rather than a hypothesis.
A question on this?
Describe the context in a few lines. I answer with a proposed angle, not a brochure.