No matter where your company is in your reopening plan, Salesforce's new Work.com platform is poised to help. As a guide, we recently shared some potential considerations and challenges when undertaking a transformative project like Work.com.
If you think that Work.com might be right for you, there are certain things you should do now to prepare, like:
Optimizing your security settings
Reviewing permissions and admin profiles
Making sure you have a cloud data protection platform in place
Most SaaS platforms like Salesforce require shared responsibility for keeping data safe, which means customers are responsible for the loss and corruption they create.
Even if you don't end up implementing Work.com, the following data protection best practices will help you eliminate data downtime in any Salesforce org.
While reopening offices is a crucial milestone for many companies, it's just the first step in a broader agenda. After stabilizing operations and reopening offices, companies can focus on the growth of their business.
For these organizations, having unresolved data loss or corruption could significantly set back their growth plans and equate to lost revenue and productivity. As you construct your backup and recovery strategy, you will need to define your recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO).
The RPO is the amount of data a company can afford to lose before it begins to impact business operations. Therefore, the RPO is an indicator of how often a company should back up their data.
The RTO is the restoration timeframe after data loss or corruption has occurred. The goal here is for companies to calculate how fast they need to recover by preparing in advance.
In addition to the Workplace Command Center, Salesforce added an employee data model within Work.com. This data model includes a set of new standard objects to keep track of all of the new data. When did an employee register a temperature? When was the last time he or she was in the office? With whom did they come in contact since then?
Answering these questions with certainty necessitates having a cloud data protection platform that allows you to recover your data from every point in time and put it back together exactly like it was before the problem occurred. The platform must be able to perform full backups every single day. For data recovery, it should also quickly compare live data to historical data.
The contact tracing app that's part of Work.com introduces new, sensitive employee data into your Salesforce environment that is subject to more stringent requirements and regulations like GDPR and HIPAA. HIPAA, for example, requires exact copies of electronic Patient Health Information (PHI) to be backed up securely and also be encrypted in transit and at rest.
Security should be a key consideration when it comes to your backups. It would be best if you were relying on a reputable solution, has passed Salesforce security reviews, and has built-in platform security features that meet enterprise needs. Include the following controls:
Salesforce stood up Work.com quickly to make sure it was ready as businesses began to reopen. Companies looking to leverage the platform should do so with a similar sense of urgency. It would be best if you didn't have to wait on your backup solution once you're ready to launch Work.com.
Whether it's for a Work.com implementation or another initiative, you need to trust your backup and recovery solution when you need it most.
The solution should have effortless onboarding, automated and dynamic one-click backups, proactive monitoring, and world-class support to ensure backup and recovery are as stress-free as possible. You also don't want to reconfigure every time you add a new object or field to your org.
One of the most significant advantages of the new Work.com product is that it was built on the Salesforce platform, shortening the learning curve for users and minimizing the technical risk of implementation. Work.com data is subject to similar risks to your other SaaS data.
Companies must have access to data and metadata through a user-friendly, controlled user interface outside of Salesforce. And backing the data up to an S3 server is not the answer, as providing access to those who might need it poses a significant security risk.
During your Work.com implementation and beyond, OwnBackup can help you protect your data and metadata with comprehensive, automated backups and rapid, stress-free recovery. OwnBackup proactively prevents you from losing access to mission-critical Salesforce data, so you never have to worry about data loss disrupting your business—or your life.