By Chris Grove, Senior Director Solutions Engineering

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In today's fast-paced digital landscape, where data-driven decisions are paramount, Salesforce data plays a pivotal role in business operations for many large enterprises. While organizations offering commercial data storage solutions may back up their production systems hourly or more frequently, the "traditional" daily backup of a Salesforce Org is no longer sufficient to protect critical data.

This urgency is underscored by the escalating financial and legal consequences of data loss. Verizon found that data loss from center outages costs businesses an average of $7,900 per minute of downtime. Furthermore, the global average cost of a data breach in 2025 was USD 4.44 million, according to IBM. The stakes are even higher in heavily regulated sectors like healthcare, public sector, and financial services, where regulatory fines often follow data breaches.

What exactly is Recovery Point Objective (RPO)?

Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the maximum amount of data loss a business can tolerate after a disaster or system failure. In simple terms, RPO defines how much data you can afford to lose, measured in time. A 24-hour RPO means your organization could lose up to a full day's worth of critical business data.

For enterprises managing billions of Salesforce records across thousands of custom objects, understanding and optimizing your RPO is essential to protecting business continuity and minimizing financial exposure.

Recovery Point Objective Examples: What Does Data Loss Actually Look Like?

To understand RPO impact, consider these real-world scenarios for a mid-size B2B company:

• 24-hour RPO: Lose an entire day of new leads (200+ records), opportunity updates, customer service cases, and account modifications 
• 4-hour RPO: Lose half a business day of activity during peak hours—significantly reduced exposure 
• 15-minute RPO: Minimal disruption, only the most recent transactions at risk

For a large enterprise processing 50,000 Salesforce records daily, a 24-hour RPO means potentially losing all 50,000 records. At an average cost of $4.44M per data breach (IBM 2025), the financial and operational exposure is significant.

The Evolving Cyber Threat Landscape for Salesforce

The past two years have seen a significant and alarming escalation in sophisticated cybercrime campaigns specifically targeting Salesforce customer data. These incidents highlight that the most significant threat today is not a platform vulnerability but exploitation of human trust and third-party access.

Recent cyber-extortion campaigns have focused on infiltrating Salesforce environments to steal sensitive customer information and corporate data. The primary methods of attack demonstrate that the threat surface is expanding:

• Social Engineering and Vishing: Threat actors have successfully used voice phishing (vishing) to impersonate IT support or partner personnel, tricking employees into installing malicious applications or granting unauthorized access.
• Malicious Connected Apps: Attackers manipulated employees into authorizing a trojanized version of a legitimate Salesforce tool, such as Data Loader, or abusing third-party application integrations (like Salesloft-Drift or Gainsight) to gain API-level access. Once authorized, these malicious apps enabled the export of massive volumes of sensitive data, including customer profiles, contact lists, and internal business data.
• Scale of Impact: These campaigns have claimed to have compromised the data of dozens of global brands, including Google, Adidas, Chanel, Qantas, and Allianz Life. One hacking group claimed to have stolen nearly one billion Salesforce records from around 40 customers.

Salesforce stresses that these incidents stem from credential theft and malicious connected apps, and are not due to a compromise of the Salesforce platform's infrastructure or known vulnerability in its technology. However, this distinction reinforces the core premise of the Shared Responsibility Model. Salesforce maintains the platform's integrity, but the customer is responsible for protecting the data stored within it.

Why a 24-Hour Recovery Point Objective is Unacceptable for Enterprise Salesforce

RPO (Recovery Point Objective) is the maximum amount of data loss a business can tolerate after a disaster. A 24-hour RPO means a business is willing to lose up to a full day’s worth of data.

Considering the massive scale and criticality of data now stored in enterprise Salesforce environments—often billions of records spread across thousands of custom objects—losing 24 hours of data is catastrophic. For companies that are victims of modern, high-speed data exfiltration attacks, every minute counts in minimizing the scope of the breach and the subsequent regulatory and legal fallout.

• Cyberattack Mitigation: A backup strategy that runs several times a day will not prevent a social engineering attack but will enable a business to recover more data than a less frequent schedule.
• Consumer Loyalty: Losing 23 hours of customer-inputted data (e.g., a hotel reservation) due to a daily backup strategy can directly translate to a loss of customer loyalty and reputation.

The sheer quantity of data at risk and the escalating threat of cyber-extortion and data theft make a more frequent backup the only realistic option for many businesses today.

How Odaseva Delivers a 4-Hour Recovery Point Objective for Salesforce

To combat the escalating threat and achieve an RPO that meets modern business and regulatory demands, Odaseva offers a specialized enterprise-grade solution:

• Protect Your Files and Data with a 4-Hour RPO as Standard
  
  • Schedule backups as often as every five minutes for critical objects.
  • Backup over 300 million records within an hour, covering data, metadata, and files, all while minimizing API and governor limit usage.
• Effortlessly Restore Even the Most Complex Salesforce Data
  
  • Proactively remove roadblocks, bypass automations, and restore parent-child relationships up to 30 levels deep.
  • Restore even highly complex objects to any point in time.
• A Perfect Restore Approach for Every Situation
  
  • Odaseva offers a range of options, from a single record restore to rolling back an entire Salesforce object to a specific point in time.
• Protect Your Salesforce Backups from Data Breaches
  
  • Odaseva Backup and Restore offers five levels of data encryption, and as a no-view provider, Odaseva can never see your data.
• Data Independence Keeps You in Control of Your Data at All Times
  
  • We decouple your backups from Salesforce, eliminating vendor lock-in and ensuring you're always in control—no matter what happens upstream.
• Leverage Rich Data Analytics to Restore with Speed and Precision
  
  • Odaseva's analytics provides a detailed view of what exactly is happening with the data.
  • Keep track of every change, set up custom alerts, and deep dive into any event to launch a restore operation.

The convergence of escalating cyber threats, stringent regulatory requirements, and the exponential growth of business-critical Salesforce data has fundamentally changed what constitutes an acceptable Recovery Point Objective. A 24-hour RPO that may have been standard practice years ago now exposes enterprises to unacceptable financial, operational, and compliance risks. 

With data breaches averaging $4.44 million in costs and cyber-extortion campaigns specifically targeting Salesforce environments, organizations need backup strategies that match the velocity and value of their data. Whether you're in healthcare, financial services, or any other data-intensive industry, achieving a 4-hour RPO—or more frequent backups for critical objects—is no longer optional. It's a fundamental requirement for protecting your business and meeting your obligations under the Shared Responsibility Model.

To learn more about how to protect your Salesforce data with Odaseva, schedule a demo with us today.