Salesforce is the leading software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based customer relationship management (CRM) solution and the second most widely adopted enterprise SaaS application.
When new Salesforce features are requested from end-users within an organization, the organization will typically create a Salesforce sandbox — a separate, isolated environment that mimics the organization’s Salesforce production instance — to do the testing.
Sandboxes are used by admins and developers to build and test new features, and enable organizations to protect production environments from defects and bugs, as the number one rule is that organizations should never develop in production.
“Salesforce is critical to every organization: the data stored within it fuels growth, ensures strong customer relationships, and helps identify opportunities to expand relationships,” said Jaspreet Singh, Founder and CEO at Druva. “Given its sensitivity and potential business impact, keeping this data available and compliant is a business-critical function.”
But since discontinuing its own recovery feature in July 2020, many Salesforce customers were facing increased risk of data loss, business disruption, or irreparable brand damage, including during sandbox testing.
Enter Druva. Its Sandbox Seeding Solution enables advanced data protection with sandbox management and data governance, delivered in the exact same way that organizations’ CRM services are accessed — via a cloud-native SaaS platform.
Preserving connections between production and the sandbox
For businesses in any industry, one of the biggest sandbox challenges happens when teams use the Salesforce Data Loader tool to copy data from a production environment to a sandbox. Druva customer Funnell Metrics knows this all too well. Before Druva, it was populating data into sandboxes via the Salesforce Data Loader tool, a manual, tedious process involving spreadsheets. According to Funnel Metrics’ Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Terry Walsh, “One of the biggest drawbacks of the manual Data Loader process is that when you copy data from a production environment to a sandbox, you effectively lose all the connections between the two.”
Funnel Metrics’ Funnelocity application is built on the Salesforce Sales Cloud. Funnelocity helps sales organizations do a better job of managing their teams. The methodology employed in the app enables sales managers to better coach and analyze data in Salesforce to understand how reps are performing and give them direction on how to improve performance.
To install the app, Funnel Metrics copies data and seeds it to a sandbox so that its AI models can evaluate the data, predict the future performance of salespeople based on their current revenue performance, and assign a zero to 10 rating on how each salesperson is likely to perform in the next year.
Walsh continued, “Every record in Salesforce has an 18-digit ID, but all of those IDs disappear and are replaced by new IDs in the sandbox. Without having those record relationships established, we had to manually figure it out, which was a brutal process.”
MuleSoft and Jitterbit didn’t cut it — enter the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud
Leveraging the Druva solution, Walsh and team can accomplish in two hours what used to take up to two weeks — a 97 percent decrease in time. “In the period of time when we were copying data manually, it took two weeks to do that. With Druva, we can do that in two hours. Especially with large complex Salesforce implementations, Druva saves us a ton of time and helps us to build out the data we need in order to accurately configure and install our product using our customers’ data,” said Walsh.
With Druva, Funnel Metrics can increase the query or selection inside the tool, and it automatically grabs the relationships a lot faster. “Our customers achieve a higher return on investment (ROI) as they start grabbing more data. With Druva, we copy more data faster and get more value out of our technology,” said Walsh.
He added, “We’re bringing efficiency to our customers’ developer teams to give them the accurate data set they need inside their sandboxes for better testing.”
“We’re working with sales leaders and Salesforce users who manage their sales organizations on our data. So, we had to find a tool that would permit us to be very efficient,” he said. “There are other tools that do data copying in different ways, like MuleSoft and Jitterbit, but they are just glorified copying tools, not really seeding tools,” said Walsh.
Sandbox seeding for 200 megabytes of data at a time
Funnel Metrics copies as much data into a dev sandbox as it’s permitted to do, which is 200 megabytes (MB) of data. “We have to make sure what we have is as complete as possible, and Druva’s Sandbox Seeding Solution allows us to manage that process, whether it’s just copying the data over or resolving errors and conflicts between the data, finding relationships in the data that we didn’t understand or know about.”
He added, “Druva’s solution has been a lifesaver for us, and we can confidently say it is one of our true success factors.”
The Druva Data Resiliency Cloud helps organizations accelerate Salesforce projects and drive efficiency with predictable sandbox seeding. This enables faster testing with greater confidence via self-service data delivery, reducing time and costs to prepare sandboxes. This means there is no need for managing spreadsheets or manual data loading.
What’s next?
Read the Funnel Metrics case study to learn more about how the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud enabled the business to reduce the time to copy relationship data between Salesforce production and sandbox environments by 97 percent, and accelerated Salesforce projects with increased efficiency via predictable sandbox seeding.