Data as a Service (DaaS): The Secret to Improving Educational Outcomes

We announced our partnership with data cloud builder Snowflake at the start of this school year prior to launching PowerSchool Connected Intelligence–the first fully managed K-12 data as a service (DaaS) platform. Connected Intelligence is giving education agencies, districts, and schools unprecedented power and insights to maximize student success.

But what is a DaaS platform? As the first of its kind in education, through this blog post we will delve into what our Connected Intelligence DaaS platform is, how it works, and why it’s such a game-changer for educators. We’ll define DaaS and how it is delivering on the promise to help districts increase educational equity, save time and money, secure sensitive data, and gain deeper data insights.  

What is Connected Intelligence Data as a Service (DaaS)?

PowerSchool’s DaaS (called Connected Intelligence) is a cloud-based service providing secure, on-demand access to a state or a district’s disparate data sources. This means that instead of building, maintaining, managing, securing, and operating their own data infrastructure which could take years to operationalize, education organizations can use Connected Intelligence, our turnkey DaaS platform, to instantly access all the data they need in one unified platform with built-in data governance, security, and data privacy via a web-based interface, native, ODBC and JDBC integrations and APIs. PowerSchool handles the hosting, management, security, processing and scaling operations, and maintenance of the data platform. PowerSchool’s DaaS transcends education agencies from building to immediately using data thus delivering on the quickest time-to-value to make the most efficient and effective use of the massive amounts of data generated across their source systems. 

DaaS helps organizations, like K-12 states and districts, access large amounts of data with a purpose-built high performance, secure data cloud when they don’t have the time, resources or expertise to build and maintain a complex and secure data infrastructure. By using PowerSchool, organizations can save time, reduce costs, and focus on their core business activities while still leveraging the benefits of insights through previously siloed, inaccessible or underutilized data with unparalleled ease. Additionally, IT team members can sleep better at night knowing data is secure in a system that provides consistent and reliable data uptime.  

How can DaaS help K-12 educators promote equity and support student success?

DaaS gives K-12 education organizations access to vital data insights through a consolidated, unified architecture. This means you get more tools to promote education equity, ensure school and district success, and help students realize their full potential.   

Here’s what our DaaS platform, Connected Intelligence, delivers:

• Unparalleled Time-to-Value: Within 48 hours of project kick-off, our customers can start exploring and analyzing their data in a secure, customer-specific data lake that we set up for them within the Connected Intelligence platform. This fully managed, extensible DaaS platform provides education agencies with all their data and the tools needed to make the most effective and efficient use of their data, including a PK20-specific data lake, data warehouse, data integration, ad-hoc reporting, and data visualization tools with a built-in AI-ML framework.   
• Convenient, secure, access to ALL educational data: DaaS provides K-12 education organizations with a unified, secured, and integrated data platform with their data from both PowerSchool and non-PowerSchool data sources, including academic performance, attendance, behavior, talent, finance, files and assessments, as well as unstructured data such as PDFs. DaaS doesn’t restrict the number of years or data elements and provides secure, authorized access to all years of history and all data elements. Education agencies are required to maintain all years of historical data for federal, compliance, and legal reasons. DaaS allows them to do so along with analyzing live transactional and future data sets in one consolidated data ecosystem. This data can be used to identify trends, patterns, and areas of improvement to inform decision-making at the state or district level.
• Near-Real-Time Access: Leveraging the best-in-class high-performance data cloud technology, DaaS securely ingests data from disparate source systems providing on-demand access to the most up-to-date results. Education agencies can immediately access period attendance, behavior incidents, newly enrolled students and staff, students who require immediate intervention supports, and more allowing for timely decision-making and quicker action. Gone are the days when education agencies had to wait monthly, weekly, or even nightly to access their most recent data updates. 
• Reduced costs and better access to funding: By using DaaS, K-12 education institutions can reduce the cost of data infrastructure and maintenance. This can free up resources that can be better served unearthing insights from the data and educational programs and initiatives by leveraging this turnkey solution. Additionally, data insights can help educational institutions determine their qualification for special funding streams, like the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA).
• Rock-solid data governance and security: Data governance, privacy, and security are of paramount importance in K-12 education as it protects sensitive and personal information about students, parents, and educators and ensures authorized access. In recent years, the education sector has seen an increase in cyber threats, making data security a crucial component of education systems. Overall, DaaS can help secure data by providing secure infrastructure, centralized data management, data encryption, access controls, data backups, and regular security updates. These security measures help protect against data breaches, theft, leaks, and other security risks. 

With Connected Intelligence, PowerSchool is helping K-12 and government agencies make the most efficient and effective use of their data and thus empowering them to improve student outcomes and create new pathways to social mobility.