With over 200,000 customers around the globe, Salesforce is the #1 CRM platform in the world. If you’re one of those clients, you’ve chosen a best-of-breed platform for your customer-facing teams -- one that guarantees 99.9+% uptime, can grow and scale with your business, and has a passionate community of experts behind it to help you every step of the way.
And since Salesforce is a cloud service, you never have to install new features or worry about your hardware. No matter the size of your business, you get access to the same computing power, data storage, security, and other foundational capabilities.
Another benefit of cloud-based CRM is that you can invest in best-of-breed apps and ISV solutions to sit on top of your Salesforce platform, such as marketing automation, document management, sales intelligence, and of course, backup and recovery. Running your business on the top CRM is one thing, but it breaks down if you have data downtime. In fact, when you consider the potential cost of data loss or corruption to your business, it’s clear that the business value of protecting your Salesforce data is just as critical as the impact of implementing Salesforce in the first place. While this might seem intuitive, too many companies spend major cycles on getting the CRM infrastructure right and then end up taking shortcuts when it comes to their long-term data strategy.
YOU are responsible for your Salesforce data
Like many Salesforce stakeholders, you might assume that your SaaS data is protected because it’s in the cloud. The truth is, though, most SaaS apps like Salesforce require shared responsibility for keeping data safe. A SaaS provider’s role is to make sure the data stored in apps like Salesforce is highly available, performant, and secure at the system level. Meanwhile, as a client, you are responsible for the data you put into it, and who you allow to access it.
This reality is even more crucial to recognize, now that Salesforce has retired its Data Recovery service. Customers no longer have the option of a ‘last resort’ if data loss or corruption occurs. While Salesforce continues to offer several native backup options like the Weekly Export, Data Loader, and the API, these partial methods will restore your basic data, but no metadata. Without this vital piece, putting the relationships between your Salesforce data objects back in place can become a painstaking process.
Data volume (and regulations) are growing
The total amount of data created, captured, copied, and consumed globally is forecast to increase rapidly, reaching 59 zettabytes by the end of 2020, according to Statista. If that number is hard to wrap your head around, just consider the data produced within Salesforce. According to a recent press release, on any given day, Salesforce customers deliver an average of 2.6 billion marketing messages, create 4 million leads, and log 19.7 million customer service conversations, while Salesforce Einstein delivers more than 80 billion AI predictions.
Of course, the fact that there is a ton of data being produced everywhere isn’t breaking news. But as data growth continues to escalate, so do the regulatory and legal requirements to control all this information. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe served as a trial run for many businesses, forcing them to navigate new data laws and put in place data backup and archiving retention policies. But this may just be the tip of the iceberg. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) went into effect in 2019, and the New York Privacy Act (NYPA) may be next. These stricter privacy laws mean businesses can no longer afford to waste money or time on out-of-date or incorrect data sets, making data protection all the more important.
Business insights are only as good as the data feeding them
In a time when face-to-face interactions are at a minimum, how you leverage data in other digital channels could be critical to your business’ very survival. Data-savvy businesses are 162% more likely to significantly surpass their revenue goals when compared to their counterparts, based on responses from a Forrester survey published on CIO Dive. Similarly, businesses that rely on data management tools to make decisions are 58% more likely to at least beat their revenue goals.
A prime example of this is the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning. While predictive models can unlock massive productivity gains and revenue opportunities, keep in mind that AI’s recommendations are only as good as the data that inform the models. To extract maximum results from AI, data science teams require vast amounts of transactions and other information to train their models.
Imagine how many deeper insights you could extract if you had a perfectly preserved view of what happened to your business over the entire last decade, versus just what your data shows today. Data resilience is a critical component of overall business resilience, so all organizations should invest in backing up, archiving, and being able to recover their valuable information.
Think back to your Salesforce implementation. Whether it was 10 years ago or 10 days ago, the buying process- from identifying a business need to standing up your live Salesforce environment- didn’t happen overnight. Though selecting and setting up a cloud data protection plan is much simpler, you should do your homework before making this decision as well. While Salesforce’s mature, proven capabilities and products are a key part of what makes them the market leader, the fact that they are also backed by experts you can trust is just as important. You should evaluate your cloud data protection options through the same lens and consider the track record of the provider you select.
OwnBackup is the #1 cloud data protection platform for Salesforce, protecting critical data for over 2,600 customers. We’ve been on the AppExchange since 2015 and have 320 five-star reviews from customers who no longer have to worry about data loss disrupting their business. In fact, we restore data to clients' production environments more than 250 times per month. They usually recover any lost or corrupted data in less than one day, compared to over a week for most non-customers, and feel 3x more prepared to restore from a data loss or corruption than non-customers.
