Success story – Blackboard taps Tuxera to help protect student data

Tuxera FlashFX Tera™ and Reliance Nitro™ prevent data corruption and ensure reliability and security in sensitive financial transactions

Providing secure services to millions of students around the world

Blackboard is the leader in education enterprise technology designed to improve the experience of millions of students around the world. Blackboard Transact™ technology gives students the convenience of one card for all their needs—from building access to campus meals, to on and off-campus purchases. They also have easy and secure access to financial aid credit balances, student payroll, or money deposited from home. Plus, Blackboard Transact technology helps make the campus a model of expert and efficient operations and delivers round-the-clock student services.

Equipment featured here may not be actual product discussed.

The challenge

When Blackboard introduced a suite of “contactless” card readers and POS terminals using the Windows Embedded CE operating system to replace magnetic stripe campus ID systems, they wanted to offer greatly improved security and ease-of-use. Considering the heightened awareness around campus security and because the systems process sensitive financial data, Blackboard needed a more stable and secure platform than anything used by its competitors.

Understanding the criticality of the data handled by these systems, Blackboard’s BSP provider recommended that they use a Tuxera flash file system instead of relying on the standard file system included with Windows Embedded CE. Tuxera FlashFX Tera (Formerly Datalight FlashFX Pro) and Tuxera Reliance Nitro (Formerly Datalight Reliance) are pre-integrated for use with CE, offering significantly improved protection from data corruption and better performance. The Blackboard engineering team was also impressed by the responsive support they received from Tuxera, which helped accelerate their development efforts and got them to market faster.

The results

Educational organizations using the new Blackboard system have the assurance of knowing their students’ data and financial transactions are protected from loss or corruption, remaining stable under any condition. “We set out to build the best campus ID and POS system in the world,” said Dennis Cozart, Vice President, Product Development, at Blackboard. “Datalight’s* reliable, robust file system gives our customers an added layer of protection.”

* This customer success story has been updated in 2021. Datalight was originally mentioned as the software provider in this story. As of 2019, Datalight Inc. became a wholly owned subsidiary of Tuxera Inc. Tuxera now owns all of Datalight’s former products, including the ones mentioned in this project. Tuxera is dedicated to providing superior technical know-how in data storage challenges and responsive customer support.

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Tuxera

Tuxera is the leading provider of quality-assured data storage management software and networking technologies. We help people and businesses store and move data reliably, while making file transfers fast and content easily accessible. Our software is at the core of billions of phones, tablets, cars, TV sets, cameras, drones, external storage, routers, spacecraft, IoT devices, and public cloud storage platforms.

Tuxera’s customers include car makers, device manufacturers, industrial equipment manufacturers, data-driven enterprises, and many more. We help them solve complex challenges involving data in all its states – at rest, in use, and in motion. They rely on our software to protect data integrity, ensure data accessibility, improve storage performance, transfer data rapidly and securely, and extend flash memory lifetime in their products and for their projects.