Blog

What Digital Services Does Your Education Institution Need? (And What Is Already Available?)

October 4, 2017

This month’s Convergence Conference in Calgary will feature a pre-conference workshop on Making the Most of Cybera: Alberta’s Public, Digital Resource on Wednesday, October 25. This half-day session will provide an overview of the many services Cybera members have access to, including: Internet Buying Group (the internet bulk buying program) Shared firewall pilot High-speed National Research and […]

Making it… thunder? Notes from the inaugural JupyterCon

September 19, 2017

UC Berkeley’s Introduction To Data Science course has just become its fastest growing course – ever. The class has 1,200 students enrolled, representing more than 60 different majors. Under the hood of the course? Jupyter notebooks, used to power the interactive textbook students are using to learn concepts of programming and data science. Classes there […]

Virtual Reality Provides Access to New Learning Environments

September 13, 2017

Kris Hodgson and Tyler Heaton, from Lethbridge College and the University of Lethbridge, respectively, will deliver a full-day workshop on Introducing Virtual Reality to the Classroom at the 2017 Cyber Summit. This workshop, being held on Nov. 7 in Banff, will showcase how virtual reality can create new kinds of learning environments. Why should we […]

Three-day makeathon creates specialized solutions for people with disabilities

September 7, 2017

Article by: Brian Cechmanek The Tikkun Olam Makers:Calgary (TOM), run by local non-profit Kadima Dynamics, proudly celebrated Calgary’s spirit of innovation at its third annual makeathon event. Local engineers and designers (‘Makers’) collaborated with people living with disability (‘Need-Knowers’) to create real-life solutions for their everyday challenges. From August 24-27, 13 teams of 4-6 individuals, […]

Alberta K-12 schools invited to make use of shared IT procurement agreements

August 31, 2017

Less than six months after the successful launch of the Alberta post-secondary ShareIT procurement service, K-12 schools are now invited to benefit from this cost-saving program. ShareIT is an Alberta-based shared service that was formed by 19 post-secondary institutions in the province. Together, they have leveraged economies of scope and scale to give participants access […]

Make your voice heard on the future of rural broadband

August 21, 2017

The House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology is undertaking a study on Broadband Connectivity in Rural Canada. Cybera will be submitting a brief to the Committee. We are inviting members, stakeholders and interested parties to share their experiences and input with us to incorporate into our submission. We believe this is […]

The dream of connecting Canada’s north has taken a huge leap forward

August 15, 2017

The Northwest Territories (NWT), like much of Canada’s north, faces serious disparities with internet access. A 2014 government survey found that, on average, around 20% of households in NWT were without internet. But this is just the average; in communities such as Fort Providence, Nahanni Butte, or Detah, the reality is that nearly two-thirds of […]

Explaining the buzz around Artificial Intelligence

August 2, 2017

Authors: David Ackerman, David Chan, Byron Chu, Preethi Kumar, Barton Satchwill PSSSTTT! In case you missed it, Alberta is a hotbed for global machine learning research. With the recent announcement that DeepMind is opening its first non-UK office in Edmonton (in collaboration with the University of Alberta), it’s clear that our city belongs with Toronto-Waterloo […]

ibg klipfolio

July 26, 2017

Below is a real-time example of CyberaNet at work: a bar graph showing the CyberaNet bandwidth use by Alberta’s school divisions. The data in this graph is automatically refreshed every five minutes, drawing the latest statistics from Cybera’s routers.

Cloud-Based Security Services

July 25, 2017

Authors: Jean-François Amiot, Byron Chu, Neil Stewart Beyond Firewall-as-a-Service The concept for the K-12 Firewall as a Service pilot is simple: leverage Cybera’s existing cloud resource, the Rapid Access Cloud, to provide a virtualized security solution for schools. These institutions are looking for an alternative to the individual security appliances employed by the majority of K-12 […]

Cybera Network Upgrade

July 14, 2017

Category: Scheduled maintenance (No down time expected) Start Time: Thursday, July 20, 2017, 21:00 MDT End Time: Thursday, July 20, 2017, 23:59 MDT Duration: 179 Minutes During the time frame indicated above, Cybera will be performing the software update on its Calgary core router. Cybera services should not be affected, but due to the nature […]

Cyber Summit keynote is encouraging thousands of women and girls to learn to code

July 5, 2017

The organizers of the 2017 Cyber Summit are pleased to announce that Heather Payne, Founder of Ladies Learning Code, will provide the second keynote address. Ladies Learning Code is a national not-for-profit that is encouraging thousands of women and girls to learn to code. Since 2011, Ladies Learning Code has expanded from its Toronto headquarters to […]

Using Terraform Part 6: Virtual Routers

June 28, 2017

Introduction In the last installment of this series, I demonstrated how to use Terraform and the Rapid Access Cloud to create a multi-tier virtual network environment. In this part, I’ll show how Virtual Routers can be used to extend that environment. Virtual Routers In the last blog post, we created a virtual machine that was […]

Representatives from ShareIT at the 2017 CUCCIO Awards

Massive collaborative effort nabs Alberta educators national IT award

June 22, 2017

Only weeks after officially launching, Alberta’s ShareIT procurement service has been nationally recognized by CUCCIO, Canada’s community of information technology leaders in higher education, for its groundbreaking collective achievement. At last week’s Canadian Higher Education IT Conference (CANHEIT), the Alberta post-secondary service received the esteemed CUCCIO Collaboration Award. ShareIT is a shared service that leverages […]