Representing 290 airlines and 82% of total air traffic globally, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) plays a key role in representing, leading and serving the airline industry. The past year has made IATA’s work more critical than ever as they support an industry that has been dramatically impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s also made clear the importance of having accessible, reliable, and accurate data to help drive meaningful policy updates.
Recently, Pedro Velasco, a Salesforce Manager at IATA joined us to talk about the importance of a backup of recovery solution to IATA. He also shared how the team uses OwnBackup to protect their data and streamline their development process. Highlights from the interview are below.
Why is an automated backup solution important to your organization?
Pedro: The way our organization is structured means that we have several processes and business units sharing data, which can result in conflicting changes with the data. A backup solution allows us to troubleshoot all possible scenarios related to data changes.
What are the top three reasons you entrust your data to OwnBackup?
Pedro: When we came across OwnBackup we were just looking for a faster process to restore data than the option provided by Salesforce. But when we saw the product in action, we didn’t see just a tool, it was literally a solution that addressed all of the pain points that the backup and restore processes posed for us.
The other reason why we chose OwnBackup against other tools is because we could see how OwnBackup evolved. Instead of making customers adapt to a rigid solution, OwnBackup continues to evolve their product based on their customers' pain points. It was also easy for us to trust OwnBackup since they are highly respected on the market. So, I’d say the three reasons that we have considered include amazing features, empathy (listening to customers) and a stellar reputation.
How does OwnBackup’s backup and recovery solution make your life easier?
Pedro: The view OwnBackup generates on the evolution of our data, including inserts/modifications/deletions, allows us to easily identify behaviors. For example, it helped us identify trends that informed us on how many platform events we needed. In addition, the daily backups allow us to have an extra parachute for all those changes on data that we couldn’t audit with Salesforce Shield, which is limited to a certain number of fields. And while it wasn’t the idea when we got the tool, it has been a relief to easily have a compliance checkmark when we are audited about our backups.
Why are sandboxes critical to your development efforts?
Pedro: We run a lot of simultaneous projects with several vendors, which means several developer teams. To comply with devops and implement CI/CD processes, we connect our dev sandboxes to a release path which is made of checkpoints to other sandboxes behaving as consolidators and gatekeepers. Our Salesforce org dates back to 2003, so we have a huge legacy where it would be difficult to deal with dependencies outside of a release path.
How has Enhanced Sandbox Seeding streamlined your processes?
Pedro: In our org, our full sandbox is refreshed only once a year during a freeze period because of the many dependencies and integrations that we need to run. So Enhanced Sandbox Seeding covers more scenarios than just development. It gave us new options when we needed to:
- Provide a playground for business users to make changes that we want to avoid happening in the full sandbox
- Preview a restore and the impact it would have on triggers, platform events, or other automated processes, that we can’t disable in a real restore
- Rehearse some massive data cleansing exercises
And of course, besides all of this, being able to provide the development team with a subset of data that allows them to test their solution, without having to commit their development far into the release path.
For more stories of customers who trust OwnBackup to protect their Salesforce data, click here.
