Virtual Firewall Service
Easing firewall management for Alberta's public insitutions
In Alberta, most organizations host their own firewall equipment, which drains valuable time and resources. The Virtual Firewall Service removes this extra workload by placing a virtual firewall upstream on Cybera’s network gateway.
Benefits of the Virtual Firewall Service
- Organizations do not have to buy and host their own physical firewall appliances.
- Reduces “hair-pinning” (where internet traffic through the centralized firewall doubles back on itself), saving on bandwidth.
- Offers a secure, scalable environment to trial new network technologies .
- Additional advantages of an Alberta-based cloud infrastructure: local data storage, Calgary/Edmonton redundancy, and reliable failover.
Cybera's Role
- Cybera hosts the virtual firewall on its network gateway.
- Members remain responsible for configuring and managing their own firewall (this service simply removes the need for physical upgrades/maintenance).
Cost to Join*
| Annual Cost | Firewalls Supported | |
|---|---|---|
| Palo Alto | FortiGate | |
| $4,180 | VM 100 | VM02 |
| $4,620 | VM 300 | VM04 |
| $5,280 | VM 500 | VM08 |
*Does not include applicable taxes or cost of selected firewall virtual machine (VM). Going forward, Cybera is investigating including an open-source firewall option.
How To Join
- This service is available to Cybera members in Alberta's public sector who are connected to Cybera’s Internet Buying Group (check if your organization is a Cybera member).
- It is geared towards smaller institutions (with bandwidth traffic of under 1.3 Gbps).
- Contact us to get started.
K-12 example
“Our district only includes eight schools, but they’re spread out over a distance of 15,500 square kilometres, so if a router blows up in one school, it can take hours for one of us to drive out there to fix it. And because our region is prone to power outages, we couldn’t risk having one firewall for all the schools. The Virtual Firewall Service has worked out great for us — it only took one afternoon to get set up, and already it’s blocking more of the content that we want blocked than our previous setup did."
"The peace of mind of not having to worry about replacing equipment when it’s reached its end of life, or worry about nine different physical appliances potentially going down, has been one of the biggest benefits of this service!”