With many businesses hosting vast amounts of critical customer information on Salesforce, it can come as a surprise to find that many do not have a full backup solution in place.
For the most part, loss of Salesforce data and its integrity often comes down to innocent user error rather than cyber criminals. According to Veeam’s 2022 Salesforce Protection Trends report, 81% of IT professionals are concerned about Salesforce data loss due to user-error.
A Salesforce administrator can inadvertently create cascading changes while working with relational data fields using the Data Loader tool, or an integration with other apps such as Mailchimp can lead to unintended data overwrites.
To get an appreciation of the critical business issues at stake, let’s start with understanding the limits of Salesforce’s coverage for data backups and the role of metadata in your Salesforce instance.
Salesforce Data Protection Is a Shared Responsibility
When it comes to your data on the Salesforce platform, not all of the responsibility is with them when it comes to the protection and integrity of your data.
Salesforce’s Data Protection Responsibilities
Salesforce has a number of key responsibilities as a platform provider, they need to keep their infrastructure like their data centres and servers secure, ensure the platform is working and available to businesses like yours and they need to take care of maintaining and updating their platform to keep it working and secure.
Salesforce Customers’ Data Protection Responsibilities
For Salesforce customers, they are responsible for managing their data, backing it up comprehensively, keeping it secure from unauthorised access (e.g from device and user accounts being compromised), integrating with secure third-party platforms, and keeping their data compliant with data protection regulations such as the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation).
Does Salesforce Offer Data Backup and Recovery Tools?
Yes, Salesforce does offer their own data backup and recovery tools, notably their Salesforce Backup tool. However, compared to platforms such as Veeam, it doesn’t have the amount of customisability, granularity and ability to backup and restore metadata. These are the capabilities that most salesforce business users actually need.
The Importance of Salesforce Data and Metadata
Salesforce’s expertise in contact management, customisation through custom fields, and its robust integrations, both within its own ecosystem and with external third-party services are all highly beneficial, but they need careful consideration and configuration when it comes to a back-up strategy. Your Salesforce data consists of customer information and interactions logged in Salesforce. Metadata is the structural aspects of this data, like page layouts, custom fields (categories), and code. They are both intimately linked and if either are compromised, they can cause a lot of disruption.
The Importance of Backing Up Your Salesforce Data
Rather like insurance, often it takes a real incident to make the importance of data backups clear. By the time risk has materialised into damage, it’s often too late! Without systematic backups in place, a business will face large amounts of extra lost time, cash, potentially amplified regulatory issues, and not to mention frustration trying to recover their data.
The importance of investing into backups are echoed by the findings of Veeam’s 2022 Data Protection Trends Report. When data loss or mismanagement materialises, it takes 39 hours on average to fully recover 39 salesforce accounts, while loss of permanent access to data can have critical consequences. 50% of businesses faced immediate bankruptcy when they experienced prolonged data management issues, while 93% of companies that effectively lost access to their data centre for 10 days or more, filed for bankruptcy within a year.
We Make Full Salesforce Backups Easy: Get Started Today
Book a demo with EO Backup today to see our easy to use and highly configurable Salesforce backup service in action. Ensure your data is not inadvertently compromised by Salesforces’ sophisticated integrations and versatile capabilities, see how to get started in minutes with our pay as you go platform that lets you seamlessly backup and recover your salesforce data and metadata with ease.
How Salesforce Data Can Be Lost
1. Human Error
By far one of the most common causes of data loss is human error, which typically goes unnoticed for some time, often beyond typical Salesforce data retention periods. For example, an admin might incorrectly map fields during a bulk data upload, leading to the overwriting of existing data.
2. Data Corruption
Data corruption can be accidental or malicious. Accidental corruption might occur due to software glitches or erroneous code deployments, while malicious corruption could be the result of cyberattacks or even internal sabotage.
3. Integration Errors
With third-party apps connecting with your Salesforce ecosystem, it’s possible for third-party integrations and exports to corrupt your data, especially through overwrites of it.
4. Outages and Disasters
Outages and physical disasters could lead to system failures and losses of data or access to it. With a recent and comprehensive backup in place, it’s much easier to recover from unforeseen events.
5. Data Hygiene Issues
When making changes to your Salesforce accounts and data management, records can be duplicated, rendered outdated or overwritten which can lead to inaccuracies in not just the data, but also the reporting functions of your Salesforce platform.
Developing a Salesforce Backup Strategy
A comprehensive Salesforce backup strategy involves regularly and reliably backing up your data and metadata, and ensuring that this is done reliably in coordination with third parties that integrate with your Salesforce datasets.
A software-based backup solution can make this much easier for your business. It should include the following components:
1. Regular Backups and Retention Periods
Regular backups and retention periods underpin your backup strategy. Regular backups can be automated to ensure that you can always bring back the most recent data for accuracy and convenience, while retention periods are helpful for things such as correcting data that has been found to be inaccurate after a given period, as well as for compliance and reporting purposes.
2. Data Accuracy and Integrity
Ensuring the accuracy and integrity of the data being backed up is critical. Your solution should be able to make it easy to see that all of the intended data that you wish to backup is being stored as intended, and can be restored fully and flexibly whenever needed.
3. Secure and Compliant Storage
Backup data should be stored securely, in a location independent from the primary data storage location to safeguard against data loss due to physical damage or cyberattacks. This data should also be stored compliantly in alignment with local data protection laws.
4. Testing and Recovery Plans
Your software-based recovery solution should be testable to enable you to see and measure the success of recovery processes, which will make full and fast data restoration more guaranteed for your business.
An independent backup solution can help your business to fully secure and configure its Salesforce data and backups to be seamlessly secure, compliant and recoverable. We will go into step-by-step detail on implementing a Salesforce backup strategy in our next blog.
Final Thoughts
In the shared responsibility model, the responsibility for keeping your data secure rests squarely on the shoulders of your business. Although cyber attacks are the high profile news-worthy incidents, much data loss is caused by more mundane admin error.
Salesforce’s versatility and integrations with others apps can create many opportunities for inadvertent errors that lead to the loss of data.
Backup as a Service (BaaS) software can make it easy to undertake regular, reliably recoverable, and compliant backups that ensure data integrity security. EO Backup’s Unique Veeam-powered backup service makes it easy to reliably, quickly and securely backup your Salesforce data, with customisable features to suit your operational and regulatory requirements.
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 datacentres, ensuring maximum convenience and security for your business while keeping your backup data compliant with data sovereignty requirements.
