Why Do You Want Your Education Data Warehouse To Be A SaaS solution?
With software as a service (SaaS) growing to be a more and more popular product among school districts due to the sheer amount of data being processed, acquired, and stored in entities such as school districts, it becomes more of an issue to ask the question of “which SaaS solution is best for my school?” rather than “is a SaaS right for my school?”.
When asking this question, it’s essential also to understand the fact that your data warehouse can not only feed into your school’s SaaS solution but, in fact, can be the very same solution that houses and organizes crucial education data as well as function as an overall SaaS solution. Now, with this comes two critical questions: what exactly are SaaS products and education data warehouses, and how do they pertain to modern schooling?
What Is an Education Data Warehouse?
An education data warehouse is quite self-explanatory in what exactly it accomplishes. It is, in essence, a large composite data bank of information necessary or helpful for schools to complete day-to-day activities and meet any national or state requirements if necessary, depending on their location or specific situation.
Today, education data warehouses, like eScholar CDW, serve many complex purposes in tandem with simple daily tasks. Along with the previously mentioned government requirements to store certain types of data, education data warehouses keep tabs on education data of all sorts, allowing schools to make educated and intelligent decisions for infrastructure, education, and more based on the data obtained and stored regarding their student body and other factors.
What Is SaaS and How Does it Relate to Education Data Warehouses?
In simple terms, SaaS products are tools designed to accurately manage, organize accurately, and store data and usually provide the option of taking action based on said data. Based on this alone, there are already a few striking similarities between the nature of the functions of both data warehouses and SaaS as ‘products.’ Because of the similar nature of the two, the coherence and clarity that would come with combining two systems that would already be working very closely and completing similar tasks would serve as nothing but a positive and more efficient change for the school deciding to choose a SaaS that supports an education data warehouse.
Similar to many benefits of simplifying and streamlining a system, using an education data warehouse that is a SaaS may be one of the following ‘norms’ in school administration.
Because some school districts will still compose in-house software solutions for their education data storage and monitoring needs, there can be a significant discrepancy between the amount of data collected and the number of actionable facts compiled from said data.
Since it is nearly a necessity for schools to have some education data warehouse on-premises, and most schools now are choosing SaaS solutions across the board, whether it’s in-house or not, there are no reasons schools wouldn’t benefit from electing to choose SaaS solutions that provide this function rather than developing one of their own when considering their software and infrastructure needs.
The amount of clarity, freedom, and peace of mind provided by a professionally developed education-based SaaS solution allows for some truly revolutionary accomplishments in the field of education and takes risk and resources away from what would be a dedicated software or IT team to develop and manage in-house solutions for education data warehouses.
