Technology is an essential piece of MSBA curriculum and at CBA we strive to provide cutting-edge technology resources to our students along with rich, easy-to-follow learning materials.  We’re so excited to announce that with the start of the Autumn quarter, MSBA students will have access to CBA Virtual Analytics Lab, which contains a Data Science Virtual Machine for each MSBA student, and Azure SQL Databases for their applied projects.

What is CBA Virtual Analytics Lab?

Through this lab, each MSBA student has access to a pre-configured Data Science Virtual Machine. Data Science Virtual Machines are remote Windows desktops that can be accessed over the Internet and they contain popular tools that are commonly used for data analytics, machine learning, and AI training. The entire list of tools can be found here.

Why CBA Virtual Analytics Lab?

CBA Virtual Analytics Lab offers an individual Data Science Virtual Machine to each student. The Data Science Virtual Machine is an easy way to explore data and do analysis and machine learning in the cloud. Since Data Science Virtual Machine comes with the most useful data-science tools pre-installed, students can jump-start working on their data projects and focus on their analysis and models instead of setting up the tools, packages, and infrastructure.

Moreover, data analytics and data science applications and projects may require high-performance computers and lots of memory and storage space. Data Science Virtual Machines offer an alternative platform to students whose personal laptops don’t meet the technical requirements or don’t have enough storage space. Especially Mac users can benefit from these machines to use the software and tools which can only be installed on Windows computers such as Power BI.

What is Azure SQL Database?

Azure SQL Database is the intelligent, scalable, relational database service provided by Microsoft Azure. CBA provides a fully managed Azure SQL Database to each MSBA Applied project team. In this way, teams can import, store, and access their Applied project data securely and conveniently over the cloud.

More information and step by step tutorials will be provided to the students via Canvas.