Dreamforce, Salesforce’s flagship event, is just a few weeks away, and the excitement is palpable. While the learning portion of the event tends to be overshadowed by the parties, celebrities, and speakers, Dreamforce is still an excellent opportunity to learn and meet AppExchange partners that can help you get the most out of Salesforce.
Three days at Dreamforce can fly by – to make the most of your time, you’ll want to be prepared with the right questions to ask. When it comes to backup and recovery solutions, OwnBackup has you covered. Here are five things for you to consider when evaluating backup solutions at Dreamforce…
Backup Data Should Be Independent
Earlier this month, Salesforce relaunched their backup solution, a native data backup service. While this solution is sure to garner interest and attention, adopting a platform-native backup and recovery solution goes against best practices.
As outlined in our previous article, storing both primary and backup data on the same platform can lead to potential risks, as any incident affecting the primary data, such as accidental deletion or a data breach, can also impact the backup data. By storing your backups on a separate platform, you can ensure they remain insulated from issues affecting the primary data.
Fast and Precise Recovery
While backup and recovery is often thought of as a single solution, each is its own distinct process that comes with its own requirements and considerations. While backing up your data is critical, the more significant challenge is restoring the data exactly how and when you need to.
Restoring lost or corrupted data is one of the most stressful situations a Salesforce admin will face. While it’s important to do it quickly, you also must do it correctly, otherwise, you’ll make a bad situation worse. The problem is, restoring data correctly is hard. Data is complex, and loss and corruption mistakes can cascade either because of the relationships between objects or automations you’ve built that update and add data to the system.
Having a way to restore data quickly and correctly, while keeping relationships intact, should be a top priority when choosing a backup and recovery solution for Salesforce.
Support for Regulatory Compliance
Unfortunately, it’s not enough to simply back up and restore data. You must do so in a way that meets regulatory requirements, which seem to grow in number every day.
HIPAA, for example, dictates that organizations retain records of changes and updates to privacy policies, employee training policies, protected health information (PHI) access logs, and other information for six years. In the US, medical record retention laws vary by state, ranging from 6 to 13 years.
On the other hand, under regulations such as GDPR and CCPA, individuals can ask companies to disclose what data has been gathered about them and request that data be deleted. Therefore, it’s important that whatever backup solution or strategy you choose, you have the means to address subject access requests and help the business maintain compliance.
Additional Data Management Capabilities
As your use of Salesforce grows and expands, the data will naturally become larger and more complex. A backup and recovery solution addresses some of the challenges created by this growth in volume and complexity of data; however, there are many more challenges that our customers have faced as their data has grown, such as:
- The need for more storage capacity, which leads to increased costs and overage fees.
- Increased risk surface as more data stays exposed to potential misuse.
- A degradation in the responsiveness of SaaS applications as screens take longer to load or reports and dashboards take longer to run.
- Growth in the number and type of users accessing data in SaaS applications, making data security more challenging.
- Developers using non-production environments, like sandboxes being exposed to sensitive data.
Finding a vendor that has solutions to solve these issues can help you address the full scope of challenges as your Salesforce data grows.
Expertise When You Need It Most
Outside the technology itself, your backup and recovery solution’s support services are vital when it comes to recovering quickly from a major data loss event. These situations call for deep knowledge of both Salesforce and your backup application, which you can’t be expected to have on your own. That’s why the experience and expertise of the specialists you’ll be calling on during emergencies is key.
Final Thoughts
During the three-day frenzy of Dreamforce, where every moment counts, arming yourself with the right questions to vet solutions is paramount. If nothing else, use this article as your guide as you move from booth to booth. And of course, OwnBackup will be at Dreamforce in full force – visit us at booth 1609 at the Moscone Center or at OwnBackup’s Independence Hall at 661 Howard Street.
Not attending Dreamforce? Check out our Buyer’s Guide to Backup and Recovery for a full list of factors to consider when evaluating solutions. We hope to see you there!