It seems like every day more stories about business continuity, disaster recovery, and IT resilience are popping up. While the terms aren’t interchangeable, there is a constant component in each one: backup and recovery.
Since Salesforce is an important system for many companies, and to protect the valuable data within the platform, having a backup and recovery strategy has become a key priority. But all Salesforce backup and recovery solutions are not created equal, and restoring data quickly is critical.
The Difference Between Backup and Recovery
Like peanut butter and jelly, it’s hard to think about backup or recovery without thinking about its counterpart. While the two terms are closely connected, each one is its own distinct process that comes with its own set of requirements and considerations.
“Backup” refers to the process of saving data by copying it to a safe place. Data can then be recovered in the event of infrastructure or service issues. Backups can take many forms – including duplicating data on the cloud or a secondary server in the same production data center, or saving data to a data center.
“Recovery,” on the other hand, involves a set of policies, tools, and procedures to enable the recovery or continuation of vital technology infrastructure and systems following a data loss. It focuses on IT-supporting critical business functions as part of business continuity, which involves keeping all essential aspects of a business functioning despite significant disruptive events.
Why Is Speed So Important When Restoring Data?
There are no weekends or holidays when it comes to data incidents. Any rogue automation or user error can result in losing access to your Salesforce data. And when the pressure is on, you need your solution to help you return to business as usual – fast.
Losing data is one thing, but unscheduled downtime can send your company into chaos. With customers being unable to access your systems, a strict limit on the amount of time it should take to recover your systems after a data loss or corruption is necessary.
Looking Beyond Backup
The key takeaway is that you need to have both a backup and a recovery strategy in place for your data. Salesforce provides numerous native tools that can be used to backup your data. However, most of these tools will not restore in the event of data loss.
Having a copy of your data is important to meet the minimum standards of a backup. But the real challenge is the ability to restore the data back into Salesforce exactly how and when you need to. To do this, you must test your strategy so you’ll be aware of what would actually happen if you were to experience data loss or corruption. When testing, ask the following questions:
- Are you able to recover specific versions of document or data or metadata?
- Are you able to minimize data transformation during the restoration process?
- How does your strategy handle different types of restore processes?
- What is the performance and time to restore?
Summary
There’s clearly a lot to consider when it comes to protecting your Salesforce data and it’s important to choose the solution that’s right for you. But shifting your focus from the “backup” portion to the much more difficult and important topic of “recovery” will lead you to more modern, forward-thinking approaches to recovering from data loss. For a more comprehensive list of factors to consider, check out this post, which covers both the backup and recovery functionalities that should be a part of your strategy.
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