Backup and Recovery

Schneider Electric Wins with Own

Challenges

• Arpita started to look into a backup and recovery solution for a variety of reasons–the most glaring one being that she needed to be able to monitor data losses by setting up trackable policies.
• “We didn’t really know who had certain privileges. We have really strict governance policies around who has the ability to delete data, but accidents still happen.”
• Arpita personally experienced use cases in test environments where data was accidentally deleted and was difficult to recover. If this happened in production, she didn’t have a strategy around how to get the data back.
• Arpita’s backup and recovery solution journey first began at a 2019 Trailhead meetup in San Francisco. She was introduced to an array of backup solutions, including Own. She made the business case for Own to her leadership team, but getting buy-in proved to be a lengthy process, and Own was ultimately denied approval due to cost.
• Schneider Electric decided to go with a different solution that aligned more with their cost requirements. But after about six months they started experiencing challenges with its data recovery capabilities.

Solutions

• As Arpita began looking into alternative options, she remembered Own.
  
• “We went back to the drawing board because the tool we selected because of price, wasn't as sophisticated as Own.”
  
• While cost was a key consideration, the benefits of using Own far outweighed the price. In fact, implementing a solution and then having to decommission it because it didn’t meet their needs was equally as costly.
  
• For Arpita, Own was the superior choice because of the breadth of features that it offers.
  
• This was a winning point in her decision.

Data Archiving

Own Archive to Save on Storage Costs

The team at Schneider Electric uses one production instance and three developer instances, with Own set up for all four.

While they were looking at Recover for Salesforce, they also identified they were close to storage capacity and needed to figure out how to free up space.

They decided to take a list of around twenty-five tables and wipe them. As the deletion occured, the members deeply considered this question: will the business ever need to access this data again?

The answer was a resounding yes.

They realized they needed to be able to access this data at any time, but their data was growing exponentially, causing storage problems.

The team analyzed how much data storage they could save depending on the parameters that the business gave them.

They applied filter criteria on the set of data they wanted to archive and uncovered that they were able to save close to 100GB of data storage. For every 100GB that they were creating, they were also saving by archiving it with Own.

“We are also able to utilize it [data storage] for other projects. With the money we’re saving on storage, we can apply that to the budget for next year, much like roadmap planning.”

In the world of Salesforce, Schneider’s instance is fairly new compared to other organizations. But, even as a relatively young org, they expect growth of 30 to 40% every year, which puts additional pressure on the speed of sandbox refreshes and building reports. They are also required to keep data for seven to ten years, and its deletion could cause compliance issues.

As a result, they decided to add Archive to their suite of products.

Sandbox Seeding

Schneider Electric Can Test First and Deploy Later with Own Accelerate

As they were getting started with Own, Arpita made it a priority to ensure that permission sets in Salesforce were correct. She then tested and validated that most of their fields were backed up properly. Arpita was cautious to test a recovery scenario until she could ensure all data was protected and matched their parent and child relationships. Given the limited resources on her team, she wanted to test seeding data into a sandbox first.

Her first experience seeding into the sandbox was a positive one. She was able to accomplish this task quickly, in about an hour. Before using Own Accelerate, it took up to four days to seed test data into a sandbox.

In the world of Salesforce, Schneider’s instance is fairly new compared to other organizations. But, even as a relatively young org, they expect growth of 30 to 40% every year, which puts additional pressure on the speed of sandbox refreshes and building reports. They are also required to keep data for seven to ten years, and its deletion could cause compliance issues.

As a result, they decided to add Archive to their suite of products.

Recovering with Own

In a recent recovery instance, Arpita was refreshing their lower environments, one being a full copy sandbox. Although she is unsure how it happened, two crucial tables didn’t get copied over to their full copy sandbox. This stalled testing, and quickly transformed into a major pain point.

It became a critical issue for the Salesforce team to replicate that table quickly, which consisted of almost a million records. With Own, they were able to create another copy from their production environment into their sandbox environment, saving them hours of work and getting testing back up and running in an expedited fashion.

About  Schneider Electric

Founded in 1863, Schneider Electric drives digital transformation by merging world-leading process and energy technologies, end-point to cloud connecting products, controls, software and services, across the entire lifecycle. They enable integrated company management for homes, buildings, data centers, infrastructure and industries. With headquarters in Paris, France and offices around the globe, Schneider Electric’s purpose is to empower all to make the most of their energy and resources, bridging progress and sustainability.