How OwnBackup Helps Companies Maintain Business Continuity

We recently shared our thoughts on why business continuity is so critical right now, the importance of data protection within a business continuity plan, and the key elements of that plan as it relates to Salesforce. 

Understanding the value of a business continuity plan is important, and defining your plan is a must. But what can you do to actually execute your plan and protect your critical Salesforce data? 

In this post, we’ll share how OwnBackup specifically helps organizations maintain business continuity in times of uncertainty-as well as during day-to-day operations.

If Salesforce data is critical to your organization, a strict limit on how much data you can afford to lose and the amount of time it will take to recover after a data loss or corruption is a necessity. To do this, you need to define your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

Your RPO represents how much data your organization is willing to lose. For example, with the Salesforce Weekly Export, your organization should expect to have an RPO of one week, potentially losing a week’s worth of data. 

Your RTO measures how long it will take your organization to recover lost or corrupted data. This time frame includes steps like identifying the lost data, finding the lost data, preparing to restore, and actually restoring the data.

By backing up all of your Salesforce data, metadata, and attachments daily, OwnBackup minimizes the amount of data your organization will lose, as well as the time it will take to recover. Our High-Frequency Backup feature goes even further by backing up highly-transactional, frequently-changing data as often as every hour. 

Another way OwnBackup helps companies lower their RTO is with Smart Alerts, which notifies users when data is changed, deleted, or corrupted, based on their set rules or statistical outliers. Without it, the most common way Salesforce admins will learn about data loss or corruption incidents is from users or management, which could take weeks, months, or even longer. 

This helps explain why OwnBackup customers recover lost or corrupted data in less than one day, compared to non-customers who take an average of seven or more days, according to the 2020 State of Salesforce Data Protection Results. 

One of those customers, South Jersey Industries (SJI), was notified by OwnBackup Smart Alerts of a profile and permission set metadata change within their Salesforce platform that affected their energy org. SJI immediately logged into their OwnBackup account to identify the issues and were able to restore the profiles and permission sets to their proper values. This further proved the OwnBackup data protection solution to be incredibly efficient and reliable during both small and large scale data recovery scenarios.

If your organization experienced a data loss in Salesforce, could you recover your data in a way that allowed you to put back just the data that was impacted by the loss, without overwriting more recent, accurate data changes? 

Since Salesforce is a relational database, the ability to maintain data hierarchies is a crucial element of a backup and recovery solution. Without this, you’ll only have partial restore capabilities. Specificity of restore is also important for being able to ensure you’re putting the right data back into your environment. Depending on your backup and recovery method, you may end up rolling back to point in time, which puts your organization at high risk of overwriting good new data with old data.

To help our customers maintain the integrity of their data, OwnBackup runs a daily, full backup of all Salesforce data, metadata, and attachments, automatically maintaining relationships for our customers during both backup and restore. Our restore capabilities allow both full and granular restore to prevent an accidental overwrite of legitimate changes. Lastly, we give customers the ability to filter and preview the data they’re restoring to make sure only specific records that were incorrectly deleted or corrupted are being put back into the system.

DenMat, a leader in Dental and Medical Device Manufacturing, found this out the hard way after a field was overwritten on several accounts. At the time, DenMat was backing up Salesforce using the Weekly Export. To recover the corrupted data, the admin team had to first identify the data that was incorrectly overwritten using SQL within their ERP system. After finding each piece of data related to each impacted customer, the admin team exported the data into .CSV files and was able to rewrite the data by uploading .CSV files containing the correct data. 

Now, with OwnBackup’s easy-to-use interface and self-service platform, DenMat can recover their data if a loss or corruption were to occur and continue to seamlessly provide dental products and services to its customers.

In the event of a disaster, it’s likely that many of your employees will be forced to work remotely. They may have the ability to access corporate servers, customer data, email, databases, and other cloud-based systems all from any laptop or mobile device. However, logging in to any of these networks without the company’s private internet connection, and potentially on a device that hasn’t been secured, increases the risk of that employee experiencing a data security incident.

When considering the security of your data, you should rely on a solution that is reputable, has passed Salesforce security reviews, and has built-in platform security features that meet enterprise needs. Saving .CSV files of your Salesforce data within the company hard drive or your laptop should NOT be considered a best practice.

To help organizations comply with security requirements, OwnBackup gives customers Role-based Access Controls to partition backup services and control who has access to them, IP whitelisting for controlling domain access, two-factor authentication to help ensure only authorized users have access, and single-sign-on.

In addition, government and industry regulations like GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, SEC 17a-4 and others were enacted to ensure companies adhere to strict security and privacy procedures. A common theme in these regulations is that no matter where data resides, the company that owns the data is responsible for ensuring its security.

To help customers address this, OwnBackup Advanced Key Management provides additional security controls over the keys used to encrypt and decrypt data stored on OwnBackup. Or, with the Bring Your Own Key Management System, organizations can use their own encryption keys for data encryption at the bucket level. 

For OwnBackup customer Walter Scott, the Weekly Export did not meet the data resiliency or encryption requirements of GDPR Article 32. With OwnBackup, Walter Scott can easily search within their backup archives to find PII and swiftly respond for Subject Access Requests. Additionally, OwnBackup aligns with GDPR Article 32, secure data processing of PII, by encrypting data in transit and at rest and ensuring immutable/unchangeable backups.

During times of crisis, the less unknowns the better. Organizations need a backup and recovery plan that is reliable and stress-free. A reliable backup and recovery plan includes automated change identification, scheduled backups, proactive data change monitoring, and the ability to reach out for technical support if needed.

With OwnBackup, you don’t have to configure your backup to specific fields and objects. Any time you make a change in your Salesforce org, we’re able to detect it and add it to the backup. We’re proactively monitoring your data on your behalf with OwnBackup Smart Alerts, and are there to help you if you have a problem with world-class support. 

After a minor data loss, Listrak found out how difficult it is to recover lost data and sought more comprehensive data protection that could not only safeguard their vital business data, but also help them in overseeing and managing it more effectively. Shortly after OwnBackup went live, the Smart Alerts capability notified Salesforce administrators about the sudden deletion of 400 accounts. The team quickly discovered the user at fault and put a better process in place to manage the cleaning of company accounts.

Data accessibility and portability is another critical component of an optimal data backup and recovery plan. That’s why storing data backups outside of Salesforce is a best practice. Should Salesforce become temporarily unavailable, you would still have access to your data and metadata at all times as an OwnBackup customer.

Data accessibility is also a key requirement of GDPR and CCPA. In support of these regulations, you should have full transparency into their data, even backups. To help organizations comply with industry regulations, OwnBackup gives customers the ability to search for where a data subject’s data, including attachments, resides within their backups. 

In addition to our backup and recovery solution, OwnBackup Archiver is a great way to keep your data compliant and accessible, speed up operations within the environment, and free up storage space within your Salesforce org. 

On May 17, 2019, AECOM was notified by OwnBackup Smart Alerts of a profile and permission set metadata change within their Salesforce platform. With OwnBackup, AECOM was able to identify, verify, and recover changed permission sets, and stay a step ahead during the disruption. AECOM now leverages OwnBackup, an independent web application, to access their data outside of Salesforce in the event of a service disruption.

We understand that this is a challenging situation and there are lots of things you may be concerned about. At OwnBackup, we are doing everything possible to make sure your Salesforce data isn’t one of them. 

As a cloud-native company with a global team and flexible workforce, we are prepared to manage all business opportunities and challenges virtually. We will continue to have open channels for timely communications with our customers, employees, and other stakeholders.