Blog

The Road To 100

July 26, 2019

This week, Cybera celebrated an impressive milestone: surpassing our 100th member. This may not seem remarkable to others, but considering we began in 1994 with just two members, and a decade ago were hovering around 20 members, our exponential growth feels pretty remarkable to us. One reason for the major influx of members over the […]

Cybera’s membership grows while its internet costs shrink

July 24, 2019

This past month, Cybera marked two major milestones: its membership surpassed 100 organizations, while the set rate for bandwidth in the Internet Buying Group has been reduced from $1.75 to $1.50 per Mbps. This is the 12th price drop for the bulk buying service since its launch in 2012. Coupled with Cybera’s Peering service, the Internet Buying […]

Building a realtor recommendation tool with the help of data science

June 14, 2019

In the fiercely competitive property market, “location, location, location” is not the only factor that influences success. Having the right realtor can also make the difference between a big gain or a big loss (or a long sell time versus a short sell time). Like many other industries, real estate covers a broad range of […]

Cybera Edmonton Maintenance Notification

May 15, 2019

Cybera will be performing maintenance on its Edmonton router. Members should expect a few short duration outages (15 minutes) during the maintenance window. 

Emergency network maintenance – tonight

May 1, 2019

As a follow up to today’s outage, we require an emergency maintenance window later tonight that will result in a few short duration outages as we resolve a related outstanding configuration issue.

Alberta’s public Virtual Firewall Service adds new security capabilities

April 30, 2019

The Virtual Firewall Service allows Alberta public organizations to cut down on their firewall maintenance costs by removing the need to host their own physical firewall devices. The service has now expanded to include FortiNet offerings, and is being made available to any small public institution in Alberta that is a member of Cybera. A […]

How Amii plans to build Alberta’s AI and machine learning capabilities

April 23, 2019

[This blog is adapted from a post that originally appeared on Digital Alberta in February 2019.] In 2018, after eight years with Cybera, our intrepid vice president of technology, John Shillington, stepped away from his role at our organization to pursue new adventures. John has always been on the vanguard of new ideas and digital challenges, […]

The rise of online education in Alberta (and how administrators are keeping up)

April 15, 2019

Education administrators in Alberta today face a host of challenges and responsibilities that were unheard of 20 years ago: from managing multiple learning platforms and technologies, to protecting staff and students from cyber threats and privacy intrusions. But what about the administrators at schools that have no physical buildings, but are completely online? Do they […]

An Introduction to Google Secure LDAP

April 3, 2019

More and more schools and organizations are taking advantage of sign-in tools from Microsoft Azure and Google for their authentication needs. These cloud-based services are often easier to manage than in-house systems, and don’t require any on-premise equipment. And with the increase in web services supporting logins from Google and Microsoft, there seems to be […]

The Origins of Canadian Supercomputing: The Visionary Role of Alberta

March 27, 2019

As part of Cybera’s 25th Anniversary, we will be publishing stories throughout the year looking back at the major milestones of Alberta computing. This week, we explore the early days of supercomputing in Canada, and how the University of Calgary’s investment in supercomputers helped set the stage for Compute Canada and the National Research and […]

Media Advisory: Data Science For Entrepreneurs Press Event Wednesday March 20

March 18, 2019

Experts from Cybera, Alberta’s not-for-profit technology agency, will demonstrate to media and workshop participants some foundational skills in data science (in this case, how to utilize data science, machine learning and natural language processing techniques to harvest Twitter for new business leads).

March 8 Outage Assessment

March 14, 2019

On Friday March 8, Cybera experienced an outage that impacted several of our members. On Friday at 4:50 pm we began maintenance work on the DWDM in Edmonton to reset a backup power supply. This work was successfully completed by 5:00 pm. Shortly after (at 5:10 pm), we started receiving alerts notifying us that the […]

In places with no internet connectivity, Alberta libraries offer a lifeline

March 12, 2019

When you look at the total geographic region that the Peace Library System covers, you get a good sense of some of the challenges faced by its IT Services Manager, Janet Ayles. Peace Library basically serves the entire top-left corner of Alberta. With 46 libraries spread over 238,000 square kilometres, Ayles sees a broad range […]

Edmonton DWDM issue and subsequent outage – resolved

March 9, 2019

Category:          Network failure Start Time:        2019-03-08  05:06pm Local time. End Time:          2019-03-08  07:45pm Local time. Status update: Service via Edmonton DWDM is restored. It was found out that the DWDM power supply failed and replacement is done.

Edmonton DWDM issue and subsequent outage

March 9, 2019

Category:          Network failure Start Time:        2019-03-08  05:06pm Local time. End Time:          2019-03-08  07:45pm Local time. Status update: Service via Edmonton DWDM is restored. It was found out that the DWDM power supply failed and replacement is done. On Fri, Mar 8, 2019 at 5:38 PM Mulugeta Yirba <mulugeta.yirba@cybera.ca> wrote: Category:          Network failure Start Time: […]