March 31 is World Backup Day. And since backing up data is our bread and butter here at Odaseva, we are here to remind you how important it is to regularly backup your data!

From personal data to large enterprise data, critical information is stored on devices and in the cloud. This data can be susceptible to loss or corruption if not backed up regularly. 

Which is why you must…

Back your data up!

Backing up data involves duplicating files or databases to another location to protect it against accidental loss or corruption, or malicious actors. 

In this blog post, we will be taking a closer look at Salesforce data backup to help you get better acquainted with Salesforce data backup and restore.

Salesforce data – a quick introduction

Salesforce is almost synonymous with CRM, focusing on customer data, managing sales leads, and enabling team collaboration. But there’s a lot more to Salesforce than just CRM, and this is particularly relevant for certain industries. The financial services industry is one such example that relies on the platform for material use cases like core business transactions and interactions.

Salesforce is a cloud-based platform that stores data in a multi-tenant architecture, in which multiple clients use the same server, but the data of one client is secure and isolated from other groups or clients.

While Salesforce is a highly secure platform, companies using Salesforce can be susceptible to data disasters that can strike any time, and in any form. Examples include an employee inadvertently making an error that results in data compromise, or an integration or deployment failure leading to data loss, or a security breach from a third party that has access to your Salesforce Org – all these could have serious business consequences.

This is why you need to protect your Salesforce data from such risks. 

But don’t just take our word for it. Here are a few top resources from Salesforce on the subject:

• Salesforce Platform Basics: Get introduced to the platform, navigate use cases, and build custom functionality.

• Protect Your Salesforce Data: Learn how you and your users can work together to keep your data safe.

• Salesforce Multi Tenant Architecture: A deep dive into the Salesforce architecture, how multi-tenancy works, and how to get the most out of Salesforce.

• The complete guide to Salesforce field history tracking: And while you may not have the undo button for your data, Salesforce does give you the field tracking history option.

Why is it important to backup Salesforce data?

Salesforce is responsible for securing their cloud from platform and infrastructure incidents, but customers are responsible for securing their own data that is stored in the platform. 

Companies need a backup and restore plan in place to protect Salesforce data, one that accommodates the organization’s complexity, size, and other requirements to protect against data disasters such as:

Data protection against user errors: According to a 2021 Forrester study, 50% of Salesforce implementations’ data loss and corruption is caused by human error. While Salesforce is accountable for ensuring data security against infrastructure and platform incidents, it is not responsible for protecting data against human errors. A third-party backup solution can help protect organizations against such errors, such as accidental deletion or overwriting of data.

Compliance requirements: With data across countries and industries, there are compliance requirements in place that businesses must adhere to; with compliance requirements come compliance challenges. Backup solutions can provide additional data protection and help organizations meet data privacy regulations, without affecting business continuity. 

Provides additional security measures: Although Salesforce provides security measures to protect data such as Salesforce Shield, some organizations may require additional security measures, such as data encrypted by a no-view provider, to protect their data. The right third-party backup solution can provide these additional security measures.

What to look for when choosing a Salesforce backup and restore solution

There are specific requirements when choosing an enterprise solution for Salesforce backup and restore: 

• Ensure the solution covers all data types: The solution must cover all types of data – (Data, Metadata, Files, Deleted IDs, Recycle Bin) and must use all available APIs such as REST, BULK, BULK V2, and SOAP. Ensure all levels of relationships are mapped and prepared for restoration, and also take into account Salesforce API limitations.

• Look for what the solution offers to extract data: It is important to evaluate whether it offers API optimization to select the fastest API for extracting data, whether it uses parallel API calls to multiplex data extraction from Salesforce, and if it uses a combination of full, incremental, and ad hoc backups.

• Ensuring compliance: Ensuring compliance with data privacy and residency laws is essential, as non-compliance can impact businesses adversely. With so many different local and regional data regulations, it’s important to consider factors such as the location of backups, encryption methods, audit trail logging, and access security when selecting a data management solution.

• A solution that meets your needs: A dedicated Managed Backup Services team to monitor and optimize backups, training or self-service support is available, it has the ability to adapt to changes in Salesforce, such as API deprecation, enhancements, and the introduction of new objects. Making sure if the interface is intuitive enough for Salesforce administrators, if it has the ability to restore or download specific data, files, and be able to support different modes of consumption. 

• Consider API usage when managing Salesforce data: Keep in mind that Salesforce imposes limits on API consumption to prevent any one customer from using an excessive amount of infrastructure resources. As a result, your API limits will vary depending on your license agreement with Salesforce. Restoring large quantities of Salesforce data can lead to significant API consumption, which can cause unintended issues if limits are exceeded and other external processes are blocked from running. 

• Data backup and data restore solutions go hand-in-hand: The solution must have comprehensive data restore options that can proactively eliminate roadblocks, bypass automations and restore parent-child relationships while keeping the data relationships intact, irrespective of how many levels deep they go. The restore process should be able to completely recover data within the organization’s Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

As the leading Enterprise Data Protection Platform for Salesforce, Odaseva offers powerful tools to keep your Salesforce data protected. It is designed and built by leading Salesforce CTAs to protect your Salesforce data against everything from accidental data loss due to a failed integration, a ransomware attack, or other business continuity threats.

For more information and to watch a demo, visit Odaseva’s Backup and Restore page here.

Take control of your Salesforce data with Odaseva. Schedule a demo with us today.