Is your data safe with Salesforce? Yes, it is a question, quite unimaginable! But it’s true!
Even with the advancements and redundancies in technologies today, there have been service outages that can even affect Salesforce. When we talk about Salesforce, it is rated as #1 CRM tool. The service is designed for global availability and redundancy. In other words, a SaaS-based company in its real sense. Still, it happens, and the frightening reality is that even SaaS applications and services can experience such mishaps – including the biggest players like Salesforce.
Today we will discuss five questions, that will help you develop a comprehensive plan for protecting your critical Salesforce data.
What does Salesforce recommend for Data Protection?
The Salesforce Help Center mentions “Although Salesforce does maintain all the backup data and can recover it, it is vital to constantly backup your own data locally so that you have the ability to restore it to avoid relying on Salesforce for backups to recover your data.”
Therefore, what do you do in the event of accidental deletion of your data? The best strategy is to have a proper backup strategy to help deal with situations like that. Waiting to implement a backup strategy after a situation like that occurs, can prove to be harmful for organizations.
What are the various factors that could impact your Salesforce Data integrity?
Threats to your Salesforce Data Integrity can come from any direction. It might seem that the process runs smoothly, yet errors can be introduced from various area. However, the concerned areas include the following:
All Third-Party Apps – Salesforce, as with most of the SaaS-based tools, offers integration with third-party apps. These apps can help extend the core functionality of Salesforce by providing organizations a more valuable system with increased productivity and efficiency. However, these apps interact with your data and therefore can alter your data in unexpected ways, ultimately leading to recovery challenge and data corruption.
User Error – As with the true nature of Salesforce, your Salesforce platform and your data is accessed by multiple teams, such as Sales, Marketing, etc. These users will have access to update or delete records. It is a process that opens the door for the possibility of accidental or even malicious activities.
Data Migration or Updates – While your Salesforce admins usually will be performing any data migrations or bulk loads. It is not unusual to encounter duplicate files or an error in the data mapping that can inadvertently update fields leading to data integrity issues.
Are you Prepared to react to a litigation request that would require you to make your organization’s data available?
At one point of time, almost 34% of the companies faced at least one lawsuit with almost $20 million value. Litigations of any size is a real concern for companies of all sizes. With any litigation comes the demand for e-discovery, therefore it is imperative to have a strategy and processes in place to retrieve those data points.
With the growth of businesses adopting more SaaS based tools in their day-to-day business operations, courts value the organization’s data in the cloud just as valuable as their data on-premise and therefore as evidence in legal proceedings.
Does any Salesforce data adhere to your company’s compliance needs?
It is true that businesses today are subjected to many compliance requirements regarding their data and how its handled. With data privacy becoming a primary focus of any organization, one of the biggest concerns is the safeguarding of sensitive customer information. This information includes Accounts, Contacts, or any data that contains personal identifiable information. Therefore, it is critical that you have a comprehensive data management strategy.
How much does it cost, if you lose your data?
Salesforce as a SaaS-based tool has proven themselves to be a real value for companies, allowing you to both consolidate and at the same time centralize your CRM data, making it available to your teams in any place, at any time. Hence, a granular analysis of this data can be performed, thereby empowering you to better manage the relationships with current customers and as well as better identify potential clients.
But what would happen if this data is suddenly not available? Yes, it is true that Salesforce can sometimes reimburse a percentage of your license cost for outages, however it can never compare the productivity loss by your data being impacted by concerns outlined above.
Work With A Salesforce Partner
After a complete analysis of the entire situation, one can come to the conclusion that Salesforce or any other SaaS-based service providers are not completely reliable for your data management. Advanced Cloud Solutions can help you establish your data management plan with proper strategies for data backup/restore, compliance and security.