How Your District Can Modernize Data Management with PowerSchool Connected Intelligence

PowerSchool’s Connected Intelligence is a powerful, unique platform where data lays the foundation to drive systemic change, student success, and economic mobility. Leveraging the unparalleled K-12 education technology expertise from PowerSchool, as well as the industry-leading infrastructure backend of our strategic partners Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the revolutionary data cloud company Snowflake, this unprecedented platform is uniquely positioned to power the wholistic student journey from childhood to adulthood with a modern, sustainable approach.

This article outlines the primary challenges with any data initiative, explores why even the most well-intentioned data projects fail to deliver on the promise of providing comprehensive, timely insights, and how PowerSchool Connected Intelligence is uniquely solving these decade-old problems and fulfilling data modernization initiatives within school districts.

First Challenge: Data Acquisition

The most significant challenge with any data initiative is data acquisition. There are several non-trivial considerations while dealing with disparate data sources. First, there is the wide variety of database technologies where the source data—from your student information system (SIS), learning management system (LMS), finance software, special programs product, etc.—is stored such as Oracle, SQL Server, Postgres, Dynamo, MySQL, Progress, Mongo, DB2, and even some legacy databases including AS400.

Additional considerations include varying cloud and on-premises technologies where this data is housed, secure connectivity required to move this data from where it is stored to a centralized data lake, export mechanisms such as direct database connectivity, APIs, and files. There are also limitations and complexities of handling unstructured data such as PDFs, Word documents, images, and videos, data volume limitations, bandwidth constraints, latency, performance, and last but definitely not least, cost. The complexity increases with every new data source or breadth of data required.

Second Challenge: Data Transfer

After the initial impediment of overcoming data acquisition, the next obstacle typically is high latency and poor performance of data transfers. Traditional methods of data integration over virtual private networks using queries or exports, ODBC/JDBC drivers, firewall restrictions, throttled tunnel traffic, and network bandwidth limitations can have unacceptable latency and low performance. The problem is exacerbated with high volume, large data sets resulting in sub-optimal, cost-prohibitive systems. Additionally, performance hits are also seen against the source database, which can adversely impact the day-to-day operations of the district.

Third Challenge: Data Reliability

Yet another challenge is data reliability. Some of the most common and pervasive issues include server down or unreachable, network failures, spikes in CPU and memory, task errors, latency issues, anomalies in data freshness, distribution, and volume, and schema changes, to name a few. Broken and unreliable data pipelines cause end-user frustration and loss of confidence in data, which is another reason why most data projects fail.

Fourth Challenge: Securing and Protecting Data

The increasingly hostile digital environments are making it progressively difficult to secure and protect data, making K-12 districts a prime target. Ransomware attacks and data breaches are on the rise. The dichotomy between increased data security and the growing importance of democratizing data access requires significant ongoing investment in securing applications, networks, infrastructure, systems, and databases with 24x7x365 eyes-on-glass monitoring and keeping up with the latest vulnerabilities, tools, and technologies which require specialized skill sets and big budgets.

How PowerSchool Can Help

This is where Connected Intelligence provides a turnkey experience. PowerSchool’s Connected Intelligence solution provides the first fully managed Data as a Service (DaaS) platform purpose-built for K-12 education that allows you to securely consolidate data from all PowerSchool and non-PowerSchool data sources. This includes all structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.

Connected Intelligence K-12

PowerSchool Connected Intelligence DaaS solution provides an extensible commercial-off-the-shelf secure, integrated, financially sustainable, and unified data platform breaking down data silos with a purpose-built state-and-district-specific data lake, data warehouses, connectors, integrations, artificial intelligence, and machine learning tools for predictive analytics, ad hoc querying, dashboard visualizations, and data security, governance, and data privacy capabilities to address the data needs of stakeholders including researchers, state and district agency decisionmakers, policymakers, educators, students, families, and communities for easing the transition from education to industry.

• The state-of-the-art platform provides native integrations with almost every database technology.  
• High-performance replication allows for near-real-time data syncs into the data lake.  
• Built-in data observability and AI-ML-based anomaly detection ensure data integrity and reliability of data preventing data downtime.  
• The comprehensive data ingestion suite supports all types of data sources including databases, files, and API-based solutions. 
• Optimized latency, performance, and cost ensure a financially sustainable and durable system.

• Industry-standard best practices for secure connectivity, data transfers, communication, and storage allow for the most secure data solution. PowerSchool invests in industry-leading security protocols to protect our customer cloud, including intrusion detection and prevention, web application firewalls, advanced endpoint protection, and 24x7x365 eyes-on-glass monitoring by our Security Operations Center. 
• Support for structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data including PDFs, Word documents, and more allow for secure, authorized governed access to all data sets, unconstrained by volume, data type, years of history, fields, and entities.  
• The fully automated end-to-end solution drives the fastest time-to-value allowing immediate use of the data instead of spending months and years building the infrastructure.  

At PowerSchool, ongoing investments in innovation bring state-of-the-art technology with stringent security, high performance, optimizations for every K-12 workload, AI-ML models, and more allows us to focus on data exploration, analysis, and driving outcomes.