Context and Challenges

Context

It is from the development side, and innovation around Salesforce for OpenClassrooms, that the need was first born. There is a fundamental need to operate with more autonomy by soliciting less from partners and producing more new features internally. The need starts with the need to save time by adopting a sandbox seeding solution to accelerate the ability to innovate, then quickly, the topics around data anonymization, metadata and data protection, are brought up. 

The implementation of Devops increases the need to have a real data backup strategy in order to respect the data maintenance principle. In a well-defined DevOps process, backups are an automated step within the CI/CD pipeline (a combination of continuous integration and deployment practices).

Challenges

• Be GDPR compliant
• Protect customer data and respect their rights such as the right to erasure and data anonymization.
• Support innovation around Salesforce within the OpenClassrooms development teams
• Facilitate the work of developers, saving them the time invested in populating sandboxes so that they can concentrate on their core business, development.
• Have a reliable way to back up Salesforce data
• Ensure business continuity under any circumstances
• Have a simple tool that is accessible to all types of users, including non-technical profiles

"Own is a shield that allows us to be sure that the company will not fall or stop. If from one day to the next we no longer had the backup, or the production, we would find ourselves in a situation where progress would be blocked. We would have no more resources... We would have to recover the backup in code. Own plays a role of trust and reliability.

-Jonathan Lefebvre, VP Business Technology

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Solutions

Three points motivated OpenClassrooms to choose Own. Beyond Own's reputation in the field of cloud data protection, it was the quality of the relationship that helped establish a strong climate of trust from the start. 

The simplicity of Own's interface, which was highlighted during the demos, allowed OpenClassrooms to project the use of the tool and make it available to people with various profiles, whether they are developers or functional staff without technical skills. The functionalities presented largely convinced the OpenClassrooms teams who then decided to secure their Salesforce records via the adoption of two modules:

• Own Recover 

Central system in the business continuity strategy deployed by OpenClassrooms. With Recover, teams are instantly alerted in case of data corruption and the data can be recovered at any time, in a few clicks.

• Own Accelerate

In addition to CRM and customer data, OpenClassrooms' development teams are constantly innovating around Salesforce and must work with effective tools to populate the Sandboxes with anonymized, secure data that is representative of the product. The various solutions developed often intervene on the data (flows, flops, triggers). Accelerate allows data to be sent and avoids the development teams having to recreate it (e.g.: a student, an account, a funding, etc.) before being able to run tests. With Accelerate, OpenClassrooms can easily send each data with all its structure to the sandbox, and thus focus on the innovative character of the development.

"The time we spend developing, we don't want to spend fixing data. Before Own, I had to spend 75% of my time on data creation and recovery. Now I go to Accelerate and I can focus on my core business, and bring all my value to OpenClassrooms. The amount of data written, created for us is a huge gain."

-Jonathan Lefebvre, VP Business Technology

Benefits

• Meet compliance requirements: Anonymizing data via Accelerate ensures that data is not exposed to unauthorized persons. Data can be encrypted at the external contact level.
• GDPR: OpenClassrooms can respond immediately to a customer's request to delete their information in the database but also in the backups. 
• Retrieve data easily: The combination of the alert system with search scripts allows for the rapid identification of the cause of a data loss and the precise restoration of the information that has been lost among the mass of data.
• Time savings: Development teams save 75% of the time usually spent preparing or repairing data and can refocus on their core business and where they bring the most value.
• Production quality: Since the data used in development is a copy of the product, the quality of what is produced is better and this is reflected in the final delivery of a project.
• User autonomy: The simplicity of use of the solutions allows both technical and functional users to use them. 
• Business continuity: Being able to recover data guarantees business continuity in all circumstances.

“Own is above all a collaboration of trust and reliability. The system runs and is forgotten, proof that it works perfectly. You know that the backups are done and that you can trust them. Own excels in its field. If tomorrow the production stops, we can continue to move forward and work on the data, at the commercial/marketing level. That's one of the strategies we're counting on to continue to grow.”

-Jonathan Lefebvre, VP Business Technology