It’s often said, but data truly is the lifeblood of many businesses today. If a business permanently loses enough of its data, it can truly be a matter of life or death! Both during and after a data loss incident, time and money can ooze out of the business, a range of customer services can come to a standstill, and the reputation of the business can crumble.
With the Salesforce CRM platform handling a lot of this data for many businesses, it’s crucial that they have a backup solution in place. The truth is that most of the time, losses of data do not happen due to cyber attacks, although that’s certainly a reality. The causes are often more mundane and accidental in their nature:
- A study by LogicMonitor in 2019 revealed that 96% of companies faced at least one system outage in the preceding three years.
- 95% of data breaches are connected with human error.
- The main cause of data loss in SaaS applications is accidental deletions, either via the manual actions of a user, data overwrites due to inter-app integrations, or changes with a knock-on impact on multiple datasets.
While there are a number of solutions for backing up your Salesforce data, these seven best practices will prove useful for creating a more secure, efficient, and reliable backup strategy for your business.
1. Find the Right Scope for Your Backups
Some may think that simply backing up all of their data all of the time and keeping it indefinitely, is the best way to go. While it is highly comprehensive on the plus side, it’s worth bearing in mind that this strategy does come with its downsides, including higher backup and data storage costs, cluttering of your backup storage, and breaches of data retention requirements under regulations such as GDPR.
Decide the right scope for your backups in terms of:
- Your operational needs and weighing up the impacts of having your Salesforce data more or less regularly and comprehensively backed up in the event of data loss
- The appropriate backup regularity for different kinds of data
- Regulatory requirements (e.g subject data accessibility and retention periods)
- Recovery point and recovery time objectives
- Data sensitivity
2. Archive Your Unused Data
You may have some data that is not being actively used, but needs to be retained for compliance and risk mitigation purposes. A best practice here is to archive this unused data separately from your in-play data.
This will clean up your data management, reduce restoration loads (unless the archived data is needed), while ensuring this unused data can be accessed should it ever be needed.
3. Set Data Retention Parameters
The data retention periods that you define has an impact on the costs, resource usage, efficiency, and regulatory compliance of your backup and recovery solution. Like segmenting the regularity of your backups, setting appropriate data retention parameters for different kinds of data will also help you to save money, manage your data more cleanly, and ensure its compliance and recoverability.
4. Schedule Frequent Backups
Of course, restoring an excessively old backup will not prove very helpful for your business! Backing up your data at an appropriate regularity will offer the best results whenever your business needs to restore it.
You can segment the regularity of your data backups depending on how dynamic the data is. Less active and critical data could be backed up weekly or monthly, although each organisation’s needs will be different.
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5. Protect Your Storage Repositories
It’s one thing to backup your data, it’s another to ensure that it is secure. If your backup is compromised, so too can your recovery processes. If you want to backup your data with a secure 3rd party provider, this can look like choosing a trustworthy provider while ensuring your network is also protected by robust cyber security measures.
If you’re working with a backup provider, check their credentials, such as if they are ISO 27001 certified, to ensure your data is in safe hands.
6. Regularly Test Data Restoration Functionality
If the data you want to recover cannot be fully, reliably, and quickly restored, then the data backup solution will be virtually pointless. A ‘set it and forget it’ stance can prove counterproductive when the time comes for a data recovery.
Use your backup solution to regularly test data restoration functionality across multiple types of incidents and recovery needs, ensuring that you will continuously be able to conduct a fast and reliable recovery whenever it is needed.
7. Consider Regulatory Requirements
Depending on your business’s activities, it will be subject to a range of potential regulatory requirements. For businesses in the UK, GDPR will be a near-universal governing body, while more industry-specific regulations such as the MHRA in healthcare and the SRA in the legal sector will also enforce standards about the processing, storage, retention and security of data.
You will want to ensure the following are implemented:
- Encryption for your data both in transit to the backup location and in storage
- Security measures such as MFA and user access controls are in place for your backup solution
- A data minimisation policy for your regulated data, including for data retention
- Regular integrity checks of your data backup and recovery processes
- Ensure data sovereignty; keep your data stored and processed within the UK as best practice
- Develop and regularly review an incident response plan that includes reporting mechanisms in the event of an incident or breach, as well as a disaster recovery plan to ensure the availability and access to data mandated under UK GDPR.
How a Backup as a Service Provider Can Help
A Backup as a Service (BaaS) provider like EO Backup can be instrumental in implementing these best practices. A BaaS provider can offer the expertise and resources that might be beyond the reach of many businesses. They can help your business to implement:
Customised Backup Solutions
BaaS providers give the functionality you need to tailor your backup and recovery solution to meet your specific needs, ensuring that the scope of your backup aligns with your business and regulatory compliance.
Automated and Regular Backups
A BaaS provider offers tools that enable you to conduct automated regular backups, ensuring they are consistently applied without necessitating manual interventions.
Efficient Data Archiving Features
BaaS providers offer solutions for secure and efficient data archiving, enabling unused data to be safely stored but also accessible when needed.
Features For Compliance and Data Retention
A BaaS provider worth their salt will offer the functionality that you need to configure your data backup and recovery processes in alignment with regulatory requirements. They can also be called upon to offer guidance in using their backup platform to meet your requirements.
Cyber Secure Data Storage
BaaS providers will be able to securely store and relay your data to and from the backup’s locations using the latest encryption and security technologies. They often work with some of the biggest and most secure hosting platforms on the market, such as Amazon AWS.
Reliable Restoration Services
By taking care of providing the tools and infrastructure needed for efficient and secure backups, BaaS providers offer an exceptionally reliable restoration capability for businesses.
Final Thoughts
Backing up your Salesforce data is not just a recommended best practice, it’s a necessity for ensuring the sustainable success of your business.
Whether you’re implementing a comprehensive backup strategy for the first time or already have one in place, following these seven best practices will help your business backup its data more efficiently, securely, and compliantly. Your data is more than just ones and zeros; it’s the cornerstone of your business! Its protection should be a top priority.
EO Backup: Backup Your Salesforce Data and Metadata in Clicks with our Veeam-Powered Platform
We offer a comprehensive, highly configurable, and easy-to-use Salesforce backup service powered by Veeam, the world’s #1 provider of cloud backup and recovery platforms. Going from signup to a running backup in under 10 minutes is easy to do. You can get started here.
We’re one of a trusted handful of Veeam-certified cloud partners in the UK, providing backups for SMEs and corporate clients for over 22 years. Our backup service is hosted within the UK in AWS UK data centres, ensuring maximum convenience and security for your business while keeping your backup data compliant with data sovereignty requirements.
