Elevate Data Quality Hosting Security Specification

Elevate Data Quality is Instructure’s hosted data quality solution, which provides districts with an easy, cost‐effective method for automatically validating and monitoring data on a daily basis. Elevate Data Quality ensures that student, school and district data are complete, accurate and up‐to‐date, by providing an easy and streamlined process.   

With Elevate Data Quality, data validation “rules” are applied to district data, and when the rules identify any records with errors, an email notification is sent to designated school and district users. No data from the records with errors is included in the email notification – only record counts, by rule, are provided in the email notification. Each user can log in to the secure website to view the actual records which are found to violate the rules and determine the appropriate course of corrective action. The following information describes the security provisions in Instructure’s Elevate Data Quality hosted environment. 

Elevate Data Quality User Access

  • End user access to the hosted Elevate Data Quality application is restricted to only IP addresses provided by customers of the service – typically an IP address range associated with your district’s network or firewall. This ensures that access to the application originates inside of our customers’ networks, and not openly on the internet. 
  • The hosted Elevate Data Quality application uses HTTPS (SSL encrypted communication) for end user web access.
  • The hosted Elevate Data Quality application enforces strong password authentication. 
  • No private data is sent in email notifications; end users must have credentials to the hosted Elevate Data Quality application to see sensitive data.   

Elevate Data Quality and the Elevate Data Quality Rule Library (TM)

(Supported Student Information Systems: Aeries, eSchoolPLUS, Infinite Campus, PowerSchool, Skyward and Qmlativ) 

The Elevate Data Quality Rule Library contains data validation rules that are applied directly against the tables in source systems, so no separately provided data extracts from the district are necessary. District data that is validated by rules in the Elevate Data Quality Rule Library is accessed nightly from the district’s student information system (SIS) via the Elevate Data Quality Data Gateway. The Data Gateway Agent is a small Windows service that is installed in the district environment and provides secure SSL communication (via HTTPS) between the SIS database and the Elevate Data Quality hosted environment. This secure mechanism is responsible for reading data from the district’s SIS on a scheduled basis and encrypting and communicating it to the Data Gateway Server installed in the Elevate Data Quality hosted environment. The Data Gateway Server controls each Data Gateway Agent remotely and notifies Instructure Support if any technical problems occur. 

Data Gateway 

  • The Data Gateway Agent provides data access to the hosted Elevate Data Quality application without the district having to open its firewall on an inbound basis; access is outbound only.   
  • Data transmitted to Elevate Data Quality is encrypted with SSL 128‐bit encryption / HTTPS.   

Elevate Data Quality and State Reporting Rule Libraries 

(Supported State Reporting Rule Libraries for the following States: California, Florida, New York, Texas) 

State Reporting Rule Libraries contain state specific data validation rules that are applied directly against the same extract files which districts are required to submit to their respective state education agency. District data that is validated by rules in a State Reporting Rule Library is transferred in an extract file via the Elevate Data Quality File Loader. The Elevate Data Quality File Loader allows districts to securely upload copies of their state submission data files on demand. Once submitted, the files are automatically staged in the Elevate Data Quality hosted environment for processing. 

File Loader 

  • The File Loader provides data access to the hosted Elevate Data Quality application when the district securely uploads a data file. 
  • Data transmitted to Elevate Data Quality is encrypted with SSL 128‐bit encryption / HTTPS.