It’s hard to believe that these are the last weeks of 2015. Time has flown by and it’s been a phenomenal year for ORION. The benchmark for our success which motivates us each year is how deeply we support Ontario’s research, education and innovation community. Here’s a sampling of such success stories.
As ORION’s director of business development and strategic alliances, I am particularly excited about four things from the year past and the year ahead.
ORION’s strategic journey
This year, ORION embarked on a long-term strategic planning exercise called the Nexus Project. Through a series of consultations and surveys with our stakeholder communities, ORION sought your feedback to direct our strategic initiatives. Community is at the core of what ORION values: we pride ourselves on being an innovation partner for our connected institutions and regional communities, constantly striving to keep ahead of industry standards and anticipate our user’s needs to ensure they have the tools they need. With that in mind, the key findings of the Nexus Project include:
- Users wanted more affordable ISP solutions, and in 2015, ORION made ISP available to connected institutions at cost-effective pricing across Ontario.
- Users saw a need for improved digital research infrastructure coordination. In 2015, ORION establishes closer partnership with Compute Ontario and in the future, greater collaboration between the two organizations will provide collaborative innovation leadership and support across Ontario.
- Users asked for greater guidance on security issues. This year, ORION launched a complimentary offer with Nebula partner Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) to provide connected institutions with CIRA D-Zone Anycast, which protects against DDoS attacks and DNS outages, free of charge.
Read the full Nexus outcomes summary on our Publications page.
Regional roadshows
Our business development team has hit the road! ORION has been a reliable partner in connectivity and cloud services and now we want to facilitate even more for our community. By collaborating with regional stakeholders, we can tackle the big problems that can only be solved together. Digital infrastructure is only the starting point; when we work together, imagine all the intelligent community possibilities when hospitals, higher education institutions, school boards and municipalities are all connected and able to transform big data into meaningful insight to improve a region.
To that end, we are meeting with municipalities to better understand their challenges and work towards digital solutions in a collaborative environment. To book a visit in your region, please contact the business development team (bizdev@orion.on.ca).
New Lunch and Learns
This year, we have been organizing webinars to re-introduce the services in ORION’s Nebula program, a suite of hand-picked cloud and software services available to ORION’s connected institutions. These webinars demonstrate the value of a Nebula partner’s solution to users. From Spyder’s network security to CIRA’s DNS protection to Resolve Collaboration’s hosted video solutions, these are the 21st century technology tools ORION extends to help our research, education and innovation institutions stay on the cutting-edge of innovation while making efficient use of budgets.
Keep an eye out for more webinars to come in 2016 by visiting our Events page.
Looking Ahead
As we welcome 2016, ORION continues to boldly embark upon new opportunities that will improve our network footprint and capacity. To stay updated and get involved in what’s next, plan to attend Ontario’s innovation event of the year at our upcoming THINK Conference, diTHINK, on May 26 in Toronto.