Admins could spend hours creating data backups, such as manually exporting and importing data back and forth between Salesforce and Excel. While this is one option, it’s the least scalable and not security compliant, exposing your organization to various threats and user errors.
With a simple and straightforward user experience, CloudAlly has been providing Salesforce backup for over a decade now. Their full commitment to stringent security and data protection means they have acquired all key security certifications.
This in-depth review will dive into CloudAlly’s features, ideal use cases, setup effort, and why it could be the right choice for your organization when it comes to fast and reliable backup!
Features
Considering the number of changes happening in any CRM day to day, backing up your Salesforce data (and metadata) becomes imperative.
CloudAlly backups are securely stored in Amazon S3 and customers can also choose between AWS US, EU, Canada, UK, and Australia data centers to comply with data privacy requirements. That’s how they can achieve a 99% system uptime.
With a 24-hour default backup cadence and API limit control, CloudAlly is sure to cover your organization’s main needs, right from the start – there is however much more to this tool than meets the eye…
Back-up Task Frequency (and Immediate Back-up)
Setting up your backup task is the first step towards exploring all functionalities that CloudAlly has to offer. There can be multiple tasks running for your Salesforce production environment and also for Salesforce sandboxes (as many as you’d like to back up).
Not only can all of your data and metadata be backed up, but you can also set the backup task cadence (frequency), with various options to choose from. The ones I will cover now are readily available out of the box, however, it is possible to take 3 backups in a day (which does come at an extra cost).
Daily Summary Report
A daily summary report, delivered to your inbox, makes monitoring easier without needing to access the platform. The report settings can be changed to display failures only, to be sent weekly/monthly, or to other recipients.
Data Restore
CloudAlly’s Recovery Tab is where you can compare archived snapshots, search by a particular item, and more.
Once the backup tasks are set and have run at least once, the data from any of your active backups are ready to be either fully restored or downloaded, on the spot.
Item Search
The item search functionality ensures that no data is overwritten by mistake, by allowing you to select the individual records to restore.
Related Record Restore
As an added bonus, it can also drill down one relationship further – let’s see with an example.
This Account we selected to restore also needs its Opportunities and Contacts restored too; instead of individually searching and restoring each of the six related records, CloudAlly ensures they will be restored at the same time as the Account.
Data Comparison: Compare current with past data
One of the perks of backing up data is definitely being able to compare the current state with values from past scenarios.
In Salesforce, data changes can be viewed in field history reports, with a maximum of 20 trackable fields per object. As you might have guessed, however, this option is more limited than what CloudAlly offers.
Right from the start, it’s obvious that you have more options in CloudAlly. Choose between both data or metadata (which we’ll get to later), and also include data comparison for child records.
When it comes to the comparison interface, not only can you filter the backed up snapshots by date, but also by one of your other connected Salesforce environments (eg. your production environment compared to a connected sandbox). Once the comparison is completed, the results will be kept for one week.
When viewing the result details, CloudAlly lets you know exactly which records were changed and offers the option to search for specific records.
Data Replication: Migrate data between Salesforce environments
Replication is mainly used for data seeding purposes, to help seamlessly migrate data between Salesforce orgs, either as a full copy of the source org’s data, or selected parent objects only.
You can replicate multiple parent objects with CloudAlly, making it possible to choose the object data you wish to replicate and specify how far down the object hierarchy (child objects) you want to go.
CloudAlly ensures that replication can be as specific as you need it to be, thanks to SOQL filters – for example, if you don’t need all records in the initial selection, or you want to randomly select a certain number of records.
Bonus – you can still decide if all related objects are needed for the replication (it really doesn’t get more granular than this!)
Metadata Backup: Protect your org configurations and customizations
It’s not only the changes to Salesforce data that count – Salesforce metadata also needs your attention with proper backup and restore. That’s exactly why CloudAlly’s platform can handle metadata as well, mainly the core backup, compare, and recover functionalities. While at present, only the option to fully recover the metadata is available, the selective restore option (showcased in a previous section) will be available shortly as well!
Once a comparison is completed, it’s really useful that the metadata changes are highlighted front and center. In the example that follows, there have been a couple of Opportunity layout changes done.
CloudAlly lets you know exactly where the change happened, drill down into its details, and download the specific change and compare it with the historical snapshot.
Future Features (worth mentioning!)
CloudAlly is one solution that continuously evolves with the times. While staying true to their core backup and recovery solution which many customers use heavily, there is a lot of work done by the CloudAlly team to develop upcoming functionalities (which you can take a sneak peek at!)
Smart alerts are certainly something that will make selective monitoring much easier, by letting you know exactly when the events you’re interested in taking place.
Planned for release in 2021, the alerts can be set for all or specific objects and later on, even for particular records, based on either record or user criteria.
Furthermore, the option to view your company’s backup history will become available, letting you know how many records have been modified. Additionally, there is also the option to view certain details right on the backup homepage for the task.
Use Cases
Compliance
Data backup and restore have received a lot of attention recently in the Salesforce ecosystem – there are countless ways in which errors and data corruption can happen – so every Salesforce org should have a backup solution and routine that’s both scalable and compliant.
CloudAlly helps ensure that your organization is no longer exposed to user error when it comes to data changes, which are irreversible if neither field history tracking nor a backup exists.
Furthermore, by reaching out to support, a backup retention period can be tailored to your company’s policy.
Admin Productivity
As Salesforce Admins, we are familiar with the struggle when it comes to data being deleted or modified from fields that haven’t had field tracking enabled on them. With a limit of 20 fields per object, either your company pays a steep price to purchase additional field tracking, or you spend your work-life exporting data from multiple objects at certain intervals – or, you could invest in a backup and recovery tool.
Now you do not have to sift through the Recycle Bin for missing Opportunities and realize it has been more than 15 days since deletion or keep your fingers crossed that certain field is tracked! With a backup tool, you can rest assured that everything is constantly backed up and can be restored in a flash.
Impact
CloudAlly stands out as a fast, secure, and reliable tool to prevent data loss at a convenient cost for the benefits it brings for your organization.
As I mentioned, their commitment to stringent security and data protection means they have acquired all key security certifications, including ISO 27001.
Setup
When signing up for the CloudAlly free trial, they say the setup takes 5 minutes which couldn’t go unnoticed from my side. I put their claim to the test – I can say it’s 100% true!
From the moment I completed the trial form until my first backup started, it was less than 3 minutes on the clock. I kept the default settings, and choosing the additional options for your org may take a few extra minutes. However, the setup is definitely intuitive, even for someone without any Salesforce experience.
Documentation and Support
It’s obvious that CloudAlly invests a lot of time and effort to keep comprehensive up to date documentation and ensures 24/7 customer support, whichever way is more comfortable for you to reach out to.
Pricing
CloudAlly offers a competitive pricing plan starting at $3 per active Salesforce seat. You can find out more about this on their website.
Summary
With various Salesforce backup tools emerging on the market, ensuring all your needs, as a customer, are met is not an easy task. However, CloudAlly successfully meets the criteria to easily be viewed as a top provider.
You can benefit from CloudAlly’s complete functionality for free, for 14 days, by signing up for their trial – it’s surely worth taking for a spin!
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