GUEST OPINION: Information has been the most significant resource of any business for a long time now. Data is what drives businesses to make informed decisions, generate valuable insights, and operate at their most efficient.
Such heavy emphasis on information also puts a lot more pressure on information security as a whole. Data safety, compliance, and general resilience to different types of threats to a company’s data are now practically mandatory instead of optional, considering how many data breaches have been happening in recent years.
Customer relationship management platforms are relatively new ways to manage customers and their information, with Salesforce being the most notable example of them all. Yet, even the cloud-centric nature of these CRM platforms does not deter from the necessity to maintain a flexible and versatile backup and recovery system, especially considering how lacklustre Salesforce’s built-in capabilities are in that regard.
Salesforce is a platform that stores all of its information in a cloud storage of sorts. This kind of storage comes with its own share of problematic factors and events, be it platform outages, cyberattacks, integration issues, or even a simple user error. Some of these issues can be prevented with Salesforce’s own capabilities, but most facilitate the introduction of third-party backup solutions in order to avoid data loss and reduce business downtime.
Compliance is another substantial reason for backing up Salesforce database using third-party measures and solutions. A lot of the major existing regulations require thorough audit trails and historical records for a certain period – something that Salesforce itself is unable to provide. Compliance-related additions to an organization’s security system can also serve as a management-related advantage for the company, such as the ability to restore previous versions of specific records when there is a necessity to do so.
Detailed action logs that describe the changes to all information over time facilitate historical accuracy and transparency for the company itself, which is not only useful for audits and regulatory inquiries but can also become a substantial advantage during various internal assessments.
Unfortunately, Salesforce has a lot of limitations to its field history tracking capabilities, including the number of tracked fields, retention periods, and even restrictions on the depth of the reporting process. This Salesforce field history tracking limit can only be avoided with third-party backup and recovery platforms with sufficient Salesforce integration, removing all of the aforementioned limitations and providing companies the freedom to store and access data records for long periods of time.
Long-term tracking with third-party solutions also provides organizations with much more thorough and detailed records of past actions, offering a lot more opportunities to capitalize on trends, spot negative anomalies, and perform other data-driven decisions.
Data tracking and information protection are just a few examples of how a company might use the necessity to improve information security to its advantage. All these examples are often highlighted in a disaster recovery plan – a comprehensive set of guidelines on how a company is supposed to react in case of substantial data-related problems, be it data loss or data corruption.
The primary point of any disaster recovery plan is to ensure that the entire infrastructure of a company can return to its completely working state as quickly as possible with minimal cost and the smallest downtime possible. Yet, a proper DR plan is very difficult to configure and even more challenging to implement. The same could also be said for more unusual data management environments, with disaster recovery in Salesforce having its own share of unique factors that should be taken into account (such as the complete reliance of the entire infrastructure on cloud-based environments).
Being able to identify your most sensitive information and the highest possible recovery time objective are just a few examples of topics that have to be extensively covered in a DR plan. Backups have to be validated on a regular basis, the entire procedure of creating backups and recovering them should be tested, and multiple recovery options should be considered in the same DR plan if the situation does not facilitate the restoration of the entire infrastructure at once.
Data breaches and system outages have become a commodity for many industries, and being reactive in your approach to data security is no longer enough to keep your company safe. A detailed proactive approach to security with multiple areas and factors covered is the best bet for safeguarding unconventional data storage environments such as Salesforce.