“Why is there a need for Salesforce archival?” This is a question that every Salesforce admin would have answered regarding the data archiving strategy of their organization.
IT heads, Salesforce admins, or Salesforce architects should evaluate themselves on the following categories and ask themselves these questions:
- Salesforce data growth and location — How has my Salesforce data grown in the last few years? Is there a huge set of stale data in my Salesforce org and is it a key aspect of my business? Most importantly, would that data be required at a later stage?
- Cost — Am I paying a lot to Salesforce for storing this data? Do I really need to keep this in my production org? Will I have to shell out more in the next budget?
- Performance metrics — Has the overall performance of my org reduced over the past few years? Are there major complaints from the users or partners when trying to access their data?
- Data privacy and compliance — Are there any loopholes in my Salesforce data protection strategy that may leave my organization non-compliant with any of the regulatory authorities? Could this ever lead to a legal scenario?
- Disaster recovery and ease of data restore — Will I be able to retrieve this data completely if my Salesforce org happens to be compromised in a cyber attack or becomes unavailable to my users?
If your team answered “Yes” to any of these questions, it may be time to have the conversation about setting up an archival strategy for your Salesforce data.
So, what are the factors that have led to this “need” for archiving data outside your Salesforce org? Let’s take a look at the key ones:
- Cost reduction with long-term retention — Organizations need to look for archiving stale, large, but important data sets into low-cost storage to receive massive savings on their Salesforce costs, as well as compliance for long-term retention.
- Increased storage — With more than 150,000 customers, Salesforce data is bound to grow, resulting in a need for increased storage capacity.
- Performance enhancement — As the data grows in your Salesforce orgs, it leads to performance degradation. Admins need to enhance their Salesforce org’s performance by purging this data while still keeping it readily accessible.
- Ensure compliance — Organizations need to ensure they’re compliant with relevant standards and regulatory bodies.
- Enhanced security — Massive increases in cyber attacks during the pandemic have resulted in the proliferation of ransomware. Moving data from Salesforce to another storage location ensures there is another layer of security, helping you prevent cyber attacks.
How does Salesforce archival differ from Salesforce backup?
It is common to hear from admins that “Since I am backing up my data, I don’t need to worry about archiving.” Let’s explore why this line of thinking is flawed.
Archiving is a strategy to keep a large set of important data, that is currently not in use, out of your production system for long-term retention.
There are a number of key benefits to archiving Salesforce data outside your org’s environment, including:
- Reduced storage cost and enhanced capacity for data growth
- Significant performance enhancement
- Full data compliance for regulatory needs with desired long-term data retention
- Easy access to restore your critical data at any time
- Added layers of security against cyber threats
In short, the immediate benefits of archiving old data are more storage, less cost, enhanced performance, compliance, and an added layer of security.
However, backup is also critical! Admins have to back up their Salesforce org’s active data to ensure business continuity. If anything goes wrong, they have a snapshot of their data at any point-in-time to recover from. Archiving is not the solution for active data.
This is the key difference between backup and archival, and while both backup and archival are important, they are not interchangeable. IT teams need to understand the importance of a two-pronged approach.
The role of Salesforce admins
As a best practice and recommended by industry experts, it is wise to rely on a third-party solution to archive your Salesforce data. The benefits of archiving are huge and, needless to say, an essential requirement for Salesforce admins.
Why rely on Druva for Salesforce archival?
Druva helps some of the world’s largest enterprises protect their investment in Salesforce and address the gaps in its data protection and recoverability. Druva is a 100% SaaS data management solution that provides an essential layer of data protection functionality to ensure Salesforce data is always protected and available. An industry leader, Druva provides proven backup and archival solutions in the cloud for all your team’s Salesforce orgs, including complete control of data and metadata.
Druva’s new Salesforce archival solution allows admins to create archival templates to easily select records from any desired object(s) or define data subsets using an advanced SOQL query builder. This data is securely retained for a configurable time period in any desired storage location around the world.
If the archived data needs to be restored back into your org, Druva’s app allows you to quickly identify what needs to be restored with a simple click of a button. The app will then restore the data back into your org.
Here are the key highlights of Druva’s new Salesforce archival solution:
- Salesforce-native app and Druva portal to support accessing and restoring your archived data
- Support for multiple Salesforce orgs, including production and sandbox environments
- Data archival template with SOQL-based query builder to archive the exact data you need
- User-defined long-term retention periods to meet compliance needs
- Multi-region support to archive data in your desired location
- Search for desired data records based on key indexed fields
- Simple and quick restore, including all master-detail relationships with a retry mechanism for archived data sets
- Dashboards, audit logs, and compliance reports for governance
- User role for archival to provide access to desired users only
- Alerts and email notifications to users for any data archival activity
Availability and next steps
Druva’s archiving capabilities for Salesforce will be generally available via the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud this Spring 2022.
Druva enhances your team’s Salesforce workflows by addressing the service’s gaps in data protection, archiving, and sandbox seeding. With Druva, customers are empowered to accelerate and protect cloud projects, increase cyber resilience, maintain compliance, and reduce the cost and complexity of their data protection.
Want to learn more? Explore the top six reasons you need a third-party data protection solution for Salesforce backup in this eBook.