If your organization is functioning on Salesforce, you have to understand how critical is the data for you. Salesforce data contains all information about the customers, including the orders, contacts, leads, sales agreements, purchase orders, etc. Losing all these data, even that of a single customer or sales order, would be a nightmare. A significant volume of data loss due to any reason may end up in a monumental disaster.
If you haven’t understood it yet, Salesforce data loss is very much possible due to even the simplest of the errors on the user side on data export or so. It can happen more often and quickly than you think. It would help if you had a proper database management plan, including foolproof backup and restoration, to tackle this challenge. Further in this article, we will discuss some of the significant causes of data loss and the impact on business operations.
However, it would help if you did not get it wrong. Salesforce is one of the top CRM SaaS platforms. This application will let the organizations run their business on the cloud without building any expensive applications in-house. Data can be easily accessed from anywhere. It is not getting stored on-premises at the organization; it is not vulnerable to physical disasters like floods or power outages.
Overall, SaaS-based applications are secure and efficient, and Salesforce CRM. However, it doesn’t mean that SaaS data is entirely invulnerable. A report shows that about 80% of the companies face data loss on SaaS applications like Salesforce for various internal and external reasons. Further, we will discuss some of the dangers if no proper salesforce data recovery system is in place.
A significant misconception – Salesforce itself has a cloud data backup
Many people think that Salesforce has built-in backup options which offer quick and seamless data recovery in case of any data failure. Usually, these cloud data solutions may be suitable for storing the backup off-premise for add-on protection. However, contrary to the common assumption, Salesforce is not a simple data backup storage because the data is available in the cloud. It is a fact that data stored on the cloud will provide additional protection against any threats compared to the on-site servers.
You need to understand that data is generated on Salesforce during its operations and not copies there. In other terms, the customer data or enterprise records may reside on Salesforce and not anywhere else as a backup or mirror copy. So, if in case you delete the data from Salesforce by mistake or intentionally, there is no scope of retrieving it from the same place. So, if something adverse happens to your SaaS data, and you do not notice it any sooner, it’s gone forever.
Another misconception: Salesforce offers a backup option
Yes, Salesforce offers an option to export the backup data, but it is minimal, and you have to initiate the same. This means your data is not backed up on the cloud on its own. You can schedule weekly or monthly backup, but it still leaves a lot of room for in-between data loss. Say, for example, if you plan your Salesforce data backups weekly on Friday, in case of a data loss event on Thursday, you may still lose the entire week’s data.
The bigger problem comes in the restoration needs. There is no one-click recovery available to restore the lost data to Salesforce. Suppose you raise a request for data restoration to Salesforce. In that case, you ultimately get a massive CSV file like a data dump, which you need to export back manually to the application painstakingly. Using the Data Loader API tools for bulk export of data may still take a lot of manual effort and time to complete the task. You also need to consider the salesforce data recovery cost of 10K dollars per recovery request. Considering all these, Salesforce exports are so good as a last resort but should not be used as your primary backup solution.
Using the Data Recovery Service by Salesforce may cost you $10,000 per instance and take eight weeks to get the data. There is no scope for questioning Salesforce’s integrity or the security measures it had implemented. However, somehow if the servers of Salesforce suddenly fail and you face a data loss, the company will be fully responsible for retrieving your data backup from the internal backups. However, this same cannot be applied when the data mishap is happening from the user side. Except for the manual export of data, Salesforce will not restore the lost data due to any server error.
Malicious deletion of data
Some of the data deletions, which may happen on your Salesforce, may not be accidental at all. Malicious actors are doing it on purpose. Sometimes, you may not be expecting your employees to be capable of intentionally erasing or tampering with Salesforce data to hurt the organization. However, this also happens more often than you think in many organizations across the globe. Many of the survey respondents of a Gartner survey revealed that they had lost their data due to internal malicious deletions. A likely scenario is when an employee is terminated from an organization and may clear his desk and his digital records online. If it is somebody with admin access, it can bring considerable damage to the company data in no time. If there is no backup left, the data can never be recovered.
Considering all these factors, it is essential to have a proper data backup and recovery system to be run when needed. You can find many such tools like CloudAlly, OwnBackup, etc., at the App Exchange. It is advised that you review the features of each to be matched with your business data backup needs and choose the most appropriate one for your purpose. You may also try to run a trail data backup and restoration run before adopting one as a final solution.
