Cybera has been notified of more tools and services being made available to education and public organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic. If you have further questions about a specific offering, please contact us at info@cybera.ca, and we can direct you to the vendor for more information.
Cybera Vendor
CIRA
CIRA Canadian Shield: Free DNS service to protect students and remote workers from malware and phishing. CIRA Canadian Shield provides DNS-level privacy and security protection for teachers, students, doctors, nurses and remote workers.
Free training course — Cybersecurity for remote workers: This free course is taken from CIRA’s Cybersecurity Awareness Training platform and explains some of the threats you face when working from home, and tips you can follow both online and offline.
CIRA is also looking to hold two webinars with Cybera members in the coming month to 1) Review the Canadian Shield initiative, and 2) Introduce new members to the D-Zone Anycast / Cybera offer. Stay tuned for more details!
ShareIT Vendors
Adobe
Creative Cloud: Adobe is making temporary at-home access to Creative Cloud available until May 31, 2020, to schools and colleges who currently have only lab access for students, at no additional cost (see the Adobe offer). This offer applies to Enterprise & Teams.
Adobe Connect: Adobe is also offering free access to Adobe Connect, their web conferencing solution, until July 1, 2020. This offer gives users the ability to join meetings, trainings, and classrooms, virtually. To learn more, visit the Adobe Connect blog.
Combat Networks
Avaya Spaces: Combat Networks is making Avaya freely available to education and non-profit customers through to August 31, 2020 (see the Combat Networks offer). The Avaya Spaces collaboration tool (business version) provides users with voice and video conferencing for up to 200 participants, as well as persistent chat spaces, and file sharing. It is accessible from a browser or mobile app.
SIP Trunking: Institutions may need to add more incoming or outgoing trunks to support all the calls being forwarded off-campus. Combat has developed a ROI tool to help Cybera’s ShareIT members determine the savings they would achieve through Combat’s SIP Trunk solutions, versus analog or PRI trunks. Combat is also offering a no-obligation assessment of institution’s current trunking needs/costs.
Juniper
Supporting Pop-up Testing Facilities: Juniper is offering a free “pop up Wi-Fi network” for temporary COVID-19 testing facilities.
Free Premium Support Services: Offered to any medical, healthcare, or senior care customers globally. Premium Support includes priority technical support and priority RMA and logistics.
Securing Critical Workloads: A free 60 day vSRX trial is available to all Juniper customers to use in their production networks. They can download and deploy on as many machines as needed here.
Securing Remote Sites: Thousands of customers use the SRX for connectivity, but aren’t using the security features. Customers with existing SRXs (any size, physical or virtual) can get free AppSec, IPS, and SecIntel licenses for 90 days.
AI-Driven Assistant For Easier Remote Troubleshooting: Juniper is offering the Marvis Virtual Network Assistant free for 90 days to existing Mist wired/wireless assurance customers.
No Interest Financing And Deferred Payments: Through the Juniper Financial Services (JFS) team, up to three years of no-interest financing and deferred payment programs (no payments in 2020) is available to customers. For any questions, please contact the JFS team.
LogMeIn
GoTo: LogMeIn is providing educational institutions with free, organization-wide use of their GoTo suite (including GoToWebinar, GoToConnect, GoToTraining, and GoToMeeting) for three months. These tools can be used by administrators and teachers to collaborate, and by students to learn in virtual classrooms and study groups.
Microserve
Quickhelp: QuickHelp is a SaaS platform hosted in Microsoft Azure that is designed to help organizations drive the adoption of the Microsoft Office 365 platform quickly and painlessly. To assist clients who want to make the transition to home office as smooth as possible, Microserve is working with Quickhelp to offer a free 45-day trial. For more details, contact Yang Wu, Microserve Director for the Alberta Region.
Microsoft
Microsoft has set up daily office hours from 1:00pm to 3:00pm EST, hosted by their certified teacher staff, for educators to use to ask questions and get support, if needed.
Social and emotional wellbeing:
- Practical ideas on how to support the wellbeing of your students.
- Learn how to use Flipgrid to keep your students communicating and emotionally connected.
Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility:
- Visit the Office Accessibility Center for the tools you need to ensure everyone in your class —regardless of ability — has access to participating, even outside the classroom.
- Use Microsoft Translator to connect with parents and students in their preferred languages.
- Discover the accessibility features in Windows 10 and Office 365.
WBM
Microsoft Teams or O365 Support: The WBM Experience Team is making itself freely available to answer any O365 and Teams related questions. You can set up a 30-minute session with an expert, or hop on a live Microsoft Teams chat to get immediate answers (available 8:00am – 5:00pm CST).
Softchoice
Amazon Chime: This service is free for 90 days to first-time Chime users (see the Softchoice offer). Amazon Chime is a communications service that lets you schedule and attend online meetings and video conferences, as well as chat, call, and collaborate, inside and outside of an organization.
Amazon Workspace: Softchoice will fund the inital discovery session to assess the feasability of Workspaces for organizations (see the Softchoice offer). Amazon Workspaces is a fully managed Desktop-as-a-Service that allows you to provision and manage Windows and linux-based virtual desktops from the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform.
Other Resources
Telus
Apple Remote Learning: TELUS Business is making Apple remote learning resource packages available to the education sector. These packages offer subsidized rental of iPads with $0 rate plans and free AppleCare plus Apple professional learning credits.
Internet for Good: TELUS is partnering with Alberta school boards to offer its Internet for Good program to ANY student who doesn’t have an internet connection at home. The program provides high speed broadband internet at home for $9.95 per month.
Business Connect: TELUS is offering a free trial of Business Connect for the education sector. This VOIP solution works with any device, and enables collaboration via videoconferencing, audioconferencing, screen sharing and more. It also has pre-built integrations with Google G-Suite, Microsoft Teams, O365, Zoom and more.
Info-Tech
Advisory Services: Info-Tech is an IT research and advisory company. They have made available best-practices on remote work and cost optimization. (See these examples of a cost optimization workbook and a CIO Pandemic Communication Strategy).
They are also providing free access to their COVID-19 Resource Centre.
Zoom
Zoom is offering free services to all K-12 and post-secondary institutions. If you have over 1,000 users, they also offer a multiple IDP option (to help with self deployment).
Educause
Educause has created a resource page to help higher education institutions plan for possible campus disruption by COVID-19. It includes examples of alternative educational delivery methods, resources for staff working/teaching from home, student accessibility and privacy statements, and examples of campus communications about COVID-19.
Cloud Resources For COVID-19 Research
Google
Google Cloud Credits: A pool of $20 million in Google Cloud credits is available for academic institutions and researchers focusing on COVID-19. The credits can be used to leverage computing capabilities and infrastructure to study potential therapies and vaccines, track critical data, and identify new ways to combat the pandemic. Applications for credits is via the Google for Education site.
AWS
AWS Credits and Technical Support: AWS is investing $20 million to accelerate diagnostic research, innovation, and development to speed up the collective understanding and detection of COVID-19, and other innovate diagnostic solutions to mitigate future infectious disease outbreaks. Funding will be provided through a combination of AWS in-kind credits and technical support. The emphasis initially will be on COVID-19, but they will also consider other infectious disease diagnostic projects.