Odaseva Data Innovation Forum Recap: Architecting for Always-On Business Continuity

The Odaseva Data Innovation Forum is a premier annual virtual event that convenes Salesforce Architects and data experts including Salesforce Certified Technical Architects (CTA). Each year the forum provides practical guidance and explores strategies on maximizing the value of enterprise Salesforce data, focusing on AI-driven architecture, performance optimization, security, and compliance in high-scale, evolving environments.

The session, “Architecting for Always On: Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery”, featured three Salesforce Certified Technical Architects: 

• Nadina Lisbon, CTA, Salesforce MVP, and MuleSoft Ambassador 
• Svet Voloshin, CTA, Principal Technical Architect at Banjack Solutions
• Sam Wadhwani, CTA, Salesforce MVP, and Director at PwC 

They addressed the critical shift from simple uptime metrics to true business resilience, discussing how enterprises must architect their Salesforce environments to withstand failures, cyber risks, and unexpected scale.

Read the recap below to learn their framework for disaster recovery, and watch the webinar replay here.

Defining "Always On" in the Enterprise

The session began by redefining what "Always On" means for modern enterprises. It is no longer just about 24/7 availability; it is about consistency, reliability, and performance.

Svet Voloshin highlighted the exponential difficulty in chasing availability tiers. While "four nines" (99.99%) allows for roughly 4 minutes of downtime per month, moving to "five nines" (99.999%) reduces that tolerance to just 20 seconds.

Because Salesforce now acts as both a System of Record and a System of Engagement, downtime is no longer just a technical inconvenience—it causes immediate reputational damage and halts revenue-generating operations.

A Framework for Disaster Recovery (DR)

Building a DR plan is about balance: protecting what matters most without overspending on low-risk areas. Sam Wadhwani outlined a four-step strategic framework for architects:

• Map for Impact: Identify which business processes are truly critical. Frequently, internal servicing platforms cause more financial damage when down than customer-facing apps.
• Define Objectives: Establish clear Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) in plain business terms.
• Match Architecture to Risk: Not every process requires a "hot standby." Allocate budget to high-risk areas while accepting longer recovery times for non-critical functions.
• Test and Automate: Move beyond "tick-box" exercises. Wadhwani advocated for Chaos Testing—intentionally breaking parts of the system in a controlled manner to verify that failovers actually work.

Architectural Patterns for Resilience

The panel agreed that there is no "one size fits all" solution for resilience. Instead, architects must layer multiple patterns to limit the "blast radius" of a failure. Key strategies discussed included:

• Multi-Instance Design: Isolating specific business units (e.g., separating Retail from Wealth Management) to prevent a failure in one area from cascading to the other.
• Platform Redundancy: Leveraging Salesforce Hyperforce availability zones for regional resilience.
• Data Replication: Using Change Data Capture (CDC) to replicate data to external lakes. This ensures that even if the core transaction engine is down, the business can access read-only data to continue customer service.
• Integration Circuit Breakers: Svet Voloshin noted the importance of looking beyond Salesforce to the middleware (MuleSoft, Boomi). Systems must be designed with idempotency to allow for safe event replays after an outage.

The Future: From Reactive to Adaptive

Looking 3-5 years ahead, the panel predicted a fundamental shift in how we view continuity. The goal is to move from "Disaster Recovery" (reacting to a crash) to "Disaster Preemption."

• Self-Healing Systems: AI will detect failure patterns in logs and automatically switch traffic to healthy nodes before an outage occurs.
• The Agentic Enterprise: As organizations rely more on autonomous AI agents, the architecture must support decentralized decision-making.
• Always Adaptive: Systems will not just be static and robust; they will be fluid, using predictive observability to adapt to threats in real-time.

Building the Future of Enterprise Data

This session was just one of the many strategic deep dives featured at the 2025 Odaseva Data Innovation Forum. If there is one unified takeaway from this year’s event, it is that the role of the Salesforce Architect is evolving rapidly. As we navigate the shift toward AI-driven enterprises, the conversations happening here are setting the blueprint for the next generation of data management.

Watch all the On-Demand Sessions of all the webinars from the Data Innovation Forum here.