Ciena Transforms Networks-and Business Potential
Ciena is the network strategy and technology company, providing network solutions for optical transport and switching carriers, ethernet data, and broadband networks. Our head office is located in Hanover, Maryland with over 27 years of industry leadership, 6,500 plus specialists around the globe, and clients in 35 plus countries.
We Rely on Salesforce
“Salesforce provides sales, marketing, and service management functionality, which are integrated with the Ciena system.”
Ciena IT recently introduced new functionality called Forecast Modeling in managing pipelines in Salesforce.com. Basically it provides the ability to track a budget in Salesforce.com. The functionality allows the user to track multiple bookings on a single opportunity and also allows sales managers to roll up and manage their sales forecast directly in Salesforce rather than in a spreadsheet.
Protect Critical Financial Data in the Cloud
Own is the tool we use in our forecast modeling and various ways to manage data between various objects that needs to be preserved and protected in terms of metadata and customer data. We use Own to compare, recover, backup, and replicate the Salesforce data. In Own we have a platform to protect our data since the data retention is key. A lot of source data records are coming in from other systems. If something is changed, we are able to go in and make modification as needed and refresh the data from the source system.
“Since a lot of key data source records exist in Salesforce, such as opportunities, customer information, and client items, having a platform that can allow us to back up and look at the changes and track history of this data has been invaluable.”
Innovate Faster with Accelerate
The normal data replicate feature from Own is good when copying complete data from one environment to another, such as production to a sandbox. However, for data with a complex structure that needs to move from one environment to another, this is where Accelerate comes in handy.
Accelerate is not necessarily disaster recovery but a time-saver by allowing the movement of a defined set of records from production or into a sandbox, which can be used for testing.
“With Accelerate, this process takes a couple of hours, what would otherwise use a couple of days to build out.”
It also allows for the creation of a number of templates with the smaller set of data, which can be populated into the sandbox. Whereas the development sandbox has limited data capacity and cannot populate all data to the sandbox, the same template can now be reused.
Anonymized data helps protect against internal and external Salesforce users seeing sensitive customer and account data. In addition, when using sandbox seeding, if a record exists and there are differences, only those records will be updated with incremental features. It will not insert a new record. There's also a feature to disabled Salesforce automations. When data seeding happens, you can turn off all triggers, workflows and validation tools. This will allow triggering customer data, customer logic, and validations. Once data seeding is complete, it automatically turns on triggers, workflows, and validation tools.
“Sandbox seeding is extremely helpful to move subsets of data with the complex data structure from production environment to any developer sandbox.”
