Protecting Your Data in Salesforce

When I’m talking with customers there are a number of areas that they ask for advice on, one is about which Apps on the Salesforce AppExchange they should look into. Being a techie geek I like products like OwnBackup and Odaseva.  Now backing up your data is never going to be the most exciting thing in the world, but it is essential.

As you'll already be aware Salesforce does a great job of backing up your data and holding it securely. It's also doing a fantastic job of disaster recovery. However, as an admin it's often the case that you need to look at your data in a wider business context and you need to back it up now, not over night.

| 70% of data loss can be attributed to user errors |

The people at OwnBackup and Odaseva have done a really good job on their systems and how the use cases of a backup can be made. Fundamentally, as an admin, you want to back-up your data when you’re running either a global update or a data import/update - just in case… And anyone who’s been in the CRM industry for a while will tell you, that even with the best will, things go wrong. 

| 27% of data loss occurs due to overwriting of correct information with incorrect information |

The simplest use case is an on-demand backup. At the click of a button, I want to ensure my data is backed up now.  By comparison, you’re looking at weekly backups from Salesforce as standard. 

Taking this one step further, you now need to be able to compare your current data with a backup to see where the differences are. This could be deletions or worse data being overwritten so it “looks right” - think junior employees accidentally overwriting data. The systems allow you to do searches within your backup and to provide comparisons between the two. This is a huge time saver.

Once you have the data you need to restore it. You can restore the entire dataset easily enough, but more often than not, it’s just not that simple. Both systems allow you to restore all or partial data. It’s also intelligent enough to do related restores i.e. if I restore an Account, it will restore related objects. This makes your recovery process much simpler and much faster than the standard offering. 

This is all great for your production environment, but it gets smarter, and they've been designed so that it’ll also restore to your sandbox and can seed your sandbox with data. This is great for partial copy sandboxes with small data limits, but you want real data to test on. As part of the process it can even anonymise your data to ensure compliance (GDPR anyone?).

So before you're fed to the sharks, check out both OwnBackup and Odaseva have great customers in their list and both provide free trials - test them out and see the value they add to your Salesforce org.

If you'd like to find other ways to boost your productivity, efficiency and data safety in CRM, get in touch.