2018 Salesforce Backup and Recovery Report Finds Most Companies Are Not Prepared for a User-Inflicted Data Loss

OwnBackup's latest insights, collected at Dreamforce 2018 from over 2,000 respondents, uncovered the true state of Salesforce data protection. The goal our yearly State of Salesforce Data Protection report is to inform those who manage data about data loss and corruption trends in the SaaS world and further raise the awareness of the importance of SaaS data protection. A key finding from the 2018 data protection survey discovered that only 39 percent of companies believe they are prepared for a data loss or corruption scenario.

This is not surprising considering 75 percent of companies reported that they have no comprehensive Salesforce backup and recovery process. A comprehensive backup and recovery process requires the ability to backup both data and metadata daily, as well as the ability to find and recover quickly. Standard Salesforce functionality, such as the Weekly Export, has inherent challenges in timely and complete data recovery. More comprehensive measures are prudent.

Salesforce does offer a data recovery service for companies who have lost or corrupted data. However, Salesforce refers to these services as “a last resort process.”* If a company discovers the data loss within three months of it occurring, Salesforce Data Recovery services can look for their data in tape backups and send them their data prior to the data loss in .CSV format. This service costs $10,000 and can take as long as six to eight weeks. Furthermore, the recipient of the data still has to work through this information to identify what was missing and selectively restore that data, while keeping relationships intact.

Recovering lost data is a time-consuming process for most companies. In fact, over half of companies that experienced a data loss or corruption took more than a week to recover their data. The cost of data loss and corruption increases significantly for companies with slow and incomplete data recovery processes. For many enterprise companies, over one week of unresolved data loss or corruption could equate to millions of dollars in lost revenue. Organizations with an established Recovery Time Objective (RTO), the time they are willing to be down, and Recovery Point Objective (RPO), how much data they are willing to lose, often put significant focus on improving these measurements.

The accuracy and availability of data is critical for any successful business operation. Companies that have shorter Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective are operating with a competitive advantage. Both measures are deeply influenced by the frequency of backups, the retention period of backups, the ability to restore data and the relationships.

Learn more about the state of Salesforce data protection in 2018 by downloading the full report here.