Salesforce is an extremely powerful customer relationship management solution offered in a Software as a Service model, which greatly reduces the infrastructure and management needed to operate a solution of this nature. Since Salesforce eliminates a lot of the complexity around customer relationship management, companies are adopting the solution at an incredible rate, which is illustrated in an IDC study projecting that Salesforce will grow 19% a year and create 4.2 million jobs worldwide by the end of 2024.

While Salesforce takes a lot of the overhead out of managing their customer relationship management solution, something that every new and existing client needs to consider is backing up or protecting their data. Here are four reasons why backing up your data matters:

You may mistakenly delete data or modify records

According to Salesforce, even with the best of intentions, users and administrators have been in situations where they have either deleted large amounts of data or modified records, only to realize later that a mistake was made. With tools like the Data Loader, it is very easy to mass-delete or -update records. And a simple mistake in your source file or field mapping could spell disaster for your data. It is recommended that you keep a regular backup of your data and do a manual point-in-time backup before you proceed with any major data project within your organization.

You may mistakenly change your configuration settings

The other thing clients need to consider is protecting the metadata contained within their Salesforce account. Frequently, we concern ourselves with only protecting data, but protecting metadata is also important.

In a Salesforce article, Best Practices: Data backup and recovery best practices, it states that just as it is easy for users to accidentally delete records or modify records, it is also easy for administrators, developers and users with advanced permissions to make changes to your configuration settings such as adding or deleting custom fields, modifying page layouts, deleting or changing reports and dashboards, or modifying custom code. As many of these changes are not reversible, the article reinforces the importance of making copies of your metadata to fall back on in the event that you need to restore prior settings.

Salesforce Data Recovery is being eliminated

In the past, Salesforce offered their own Data Recovery service. However, Salesforce announced that effective July 31, 2020 their Data Recovery service will be no longer be available. According to Salesforce, the reason they are deprecating the service is because the data recovery process does not meet their high standards for customer experience due to the length of time and reliability of the process, which takes a minimum of six to eight weeks to complete. Since they cannot guarantee 100% data recovery, they are no longer offering this service.

Salesforce native tools may not cover all your data protection needs

Salesforce still offers native tools to manually protect data through Data Export Service, Data Loader, and Report Exporter. However, these tools all have their limitations; they only run weekly or monthly, as is case with Data Export Services, or require manually selecting the data to be exported via SOQL queries, which is the case with Data Loader. This leaves clients with a large gap to fill when protecting their data, and the risk of losing large amounts of records.

Despite Salesforce’s recommendations above, many clients believe they are protected because Salesforce offers a recycle bin. While this is true to an extent, there are three things you need to consider about the recycle bin:

  1. There is a limit on how much the recycle bin can hold. The limit for the recycle bin is 25 times the storage capacity as records. This might seem like a lot, but it can get filled quickly if you are using bulk updates.
  2. The recycle bin only holds records for 15 days. If something is deleted it needs to be found quickly.
  3. The recycle bin only holds the latest version of a record and does not retain the metadata for a record. This is the most challenging and concerning limitation because it is likely that an admin or user would notice deleted records, but it is very easy to miss if a record has been updated with bad or corrupt data. The recycle bin is good for small operational issues but does not offer enough protection to cover everything.

For most clients, their customer relationship management data is some of the most valuable and business-critical data they possess. A long-term outage or loss of data can cost a company millions of dollars. The good news is there are many third-party applications that can protect your Salesforce data and allow you to follow Salesforce recommendations for protecting your Salesforce data.

Sirius has a data protection team that focuses on and specializes in having a deep understanding of these third-party applications. Sirius professionals have experience independently evaluating data protection products to simplify the decision process for clients. If you would like to speak with a Sirius data protection specialist about protecting your Salesforce data, please speak with your Sirius client executive or contact us directly at dpim@siriuscom.com.