How to Safely Accelerate Your Digital Transformation on the Salesforce Platform

For many organizations, the current situation has caused a dramatic shift in priorities and resources. And not every company is being impacted in the same way. For example, a recent survey revealed that while 38% of organizations plan to decrease their annual tech budget, nearly two-thirds will do the opposite. 

What about your organization? If you compared your company’s original plan for this year with the current one, would they look similar? A little different? Or do they not resemble each other at all?  

During uncertain times like these, it can be tempting to de-prioritize certain projects while you focus on more critical priorities. According to one survey of CIOs, up to 80% of digital transformation projects face delay, failure, or a scale-down. However, experts say that once you’ve addressed the health, safety, and security of your employees and business, you should actually turn your attention back to your digital transformation efforts. Their argument? Companies that continue to invest in their digital strategy will emerge from this crisis more competitive. 

Digital Transformation is a broad topic that refers to the process of using digital technologies to create new business processes, culture, and customer experiences. While IT often drives digital transformation strategy, departments from across the organization are key to its success. For sales and marketing teams especially, Salesforce plays an important role in these efforts.

In this post, we’ll look into some of the ways you can accelerate your digital strategy on the Salesforce platform, and how OwnBackup can support those efforts.

If your organization hasn’t moved over to Lightning yet, now’s the time. The new interface was built to support organizations as they modernize their digital operations. Plus, all future Salesforce innovations will be made in Lightning. 

But before you transition to Salesforce Lightning Experience, it’s important to secure your business with a solid data protection foundation. Business risk is high during this transformative initiative, which means it’s critical to have a comprehensive data, metadata, and attachment backup and recovery strategy in place beforehand. Although migrations are ideal for moving large volumes of data, consolidating data, and complex transformations, these migrations always pose a risk of incorrect data overwriting.

To help you protect your business data during the transition from Classic to Lightning, OwnBackup provides customers with automatic daily backups, on-demand backups, and high-frequency transactional object backups, minimizing your recovery point objective. Plus, OwnBackup Smart Alerts can automatically identify any suspicious modifications that you can investigate further and correct if necessary before your users even notice.

One OwnBackup customer, Adecco USA, experienced challenges when converting attachments to Lightning files. After their attachments were converted to files, they were permanently deleted to save storage space. OwnBackup not only secured this process through regular backups of Adecco USA’s attachments and files, but the solution’s unlimited file retention enabled Adecco USA to restore any lost attachments or Lightning files if needed. With OwnBackup, Adecco USA has transitioned to Lightning with confidence, knowing their Salesforce data will remain safe and sound.

As your business grows on Salesforce, you may occasionally need to perform an org migration, which is a set of processes that move a production org from a source Salesforce instance to a target Salesforce instance. The agility and execution of org migrations allows Salesforce to balance activity within their infrastructure and avoid resource contentions.

While org migrations can be highly-transformative projects, they do involve some risks; one of which involves potentially updating hundreds, thousands, or even millions of records through automated processing. Before beginning one of these projects, make sure you are aware of any automations and configurations that could update data without your knowledge. 

OwnBackup will proactively monitor erroneous changes to protect your company’s data integrity. As an added precaution, you’ll also be able to retain depreciated org data and metadata in any database format and easily export all data and files.

For commercial real estate company NorthMarq, they understood the need to have a data protection foundation in place with a massive data migration project on the horizon. NorthMarq wanted to spend less time, money, and energy searching through data logs and previous backups to find lost or corrupted data. With the help of OwnBackup, NorthMarq was able to identify any data that had been modified or altered during the migration process. This allowed them to effectively minimize downtime, protect their data from potential data loss or corruption, and continue to seamlessly provide services to its clients and users.

In addition to org migrations, integrating other systems with Salesforce can bring new levels of efficiency to processes that span different departments. You can also enhance your org with solutions from the AppExchange including apps, Lightning components, Flow solutions, and more.

Like with org migrations however, integrating new systems or applications can unknowingly impact your data due to the automated nature of these integrations. 

One admin we talked to learned this lesson when integrating a security software tool with Salesforce. The tool was meant to streamline user management with single sign on, multi-factor authentication, and other similar functionality. However, moments after the tool was pushed live, all of the company’s Salesforce users were locked out. Even worse, this happened with a few days left in the business quarter. Luckily though, the company had OwnBackup. The admin was able to quickly identify the integration issue, compare the incorrect usernames with the ones from the previous days’ backup, and restore the correct usernames in one click. Even better, they hit their quarterly sales goal.

One of the reasons Salesforce is so popular is the ability to customize it to your unique business needs. Besides applications and integrations mentioned above that are typically created by Salesforce developers, customizations can also include simple no-code and low-code enhancements deployed by Salesforce admins and business analysts. Whether basic or complex, the goal of these projects is to turn ideas into valuable business features and apps as quickly as possible. 

Still, you must balance the desire to release new features with the negative impacts of preventable errors making it into production. To mitigate these risks, many organizations leverage staging environments, or sandboxes to test and develop new code. Unfortunately, getting relevant, fresh test data as often you need to for complete testing can be difficult and time consuming. 

To help organizations accelerate development, testing, and training within sandboxes, OwnBackup’s Sandbox Seeding makes it easy to populate a Salesforce sandbox with a perfect, anonymized test data set in minutes. With Sandbox Seeding, developers can effortlessly define, fine-tune, and automate the replication of precise subsets of data schemes from production environments or other sandboxes, then quickly seed them to Developer, Developer Pro, or Partial Sandboxes with identical metadata. 

For energy company SJI, OwnBackup Sandbox Seeding helped them run faster development cycles and testing and ensured the seamless deployment of clean and precise data sets. For example, when SJI needed to build out a new org quickly due to a recent acquisition, they were able to populate seven different sandboxes with real-time test data in less than 30 minutes each. OwnBackup Sandbox Seeding was able to save SJI close to two hours in their development process per individual sandbox, giving them back 14 hours to spend on other innovative projects.

For many customers, the current situation has shined a spotlight not just on business continuity, but their digital processes in general. Implementing OwnBackup’s backup and recovery solution, along with sandbox seeding, will allow you to simplify future digital transformation projects, minimize real concerns, and avoid costly consequences.