For enterprises, the requirements and considerations involved in effectively backing up their Salesforce instance are more complex and comprehensive than they are for SMEs. There’s enhanced risk, more possibilities for data loss, security issues, and inefficiencies that need to be captured and controlled to ensure Salesforce backups and recoveries are done securely, efficiently, and compliantly.
In this platform-agnostic guide, we’ll help you get the insight that you need to manage your Salesforce backup and recovery more effectively.
Why Enterprises Need To Backup Their Salesforce Data Effectively
Need and effectively are the two key words here. For a large enterprise, Salesforce is far more than just a CRM; especially noticed when its not working as it should, it is a vital lifeline for your operations, safeguarding the experience of your customers, and ensuring data protection compliance and customer security.
Salesforce Data Loss Risks for Enterprises
Enterprises have more to gain from Salesforce’s powerful capabilities, but they also have more to lose:
- They harbour more possibilities for the permanent loss, deletion, and destruction of Salesforce data.
- They face greater requirements and scrutiny under regulations such as UK GDPR.
- There’s far more to potentially lose as an immediate consequence of data loss, in financial, reputational, operational, and legal terms.
- They potentially face astronomical Salesforce recovery costs, including short and long term costs in their direct and indirect forms.
- Reputational and legal damage; regulators and customers alike can pass harsher and more scalable judgements on larger businesses for not meeting their expectations.
Salesforce Data Backup & Recovery Key Objectives for Enterprises
Turning to effectively for your business this will look like backing up, storing, and recovering your Salesforce data:
- Compliantly: That all Salesforce backup and recovery processes work in alignment with your regulatory requirements.
- Comprehensively: That your Salesforce data is fully backed up according to your needs and goals, and is done so regularly.
- Securely: That backup, storage, and recovery of your Salesforce data meets enterprise-level cyber security standards, ensuring its protection and your business continuity.
- Efficiently: That the backup and storage of your Salesforce data is done cost-efficiently and scalably for your business.
- Flexibly: That the Salesforce backup solution your enterprise uses offers the flexible features that you need to meet all of these key objectives.
Salesforce Backups and Enterprise Business Continuity and Cyber Security
The cyber threats facing enterprises are posed by internal and external factors alike. In fact, one of the biggest culprits and reasons for enterprise adoption of backup solutions, is the commonality of user-error in the accidental loss and deletion of data!Cyber bad guys aren’t just a threat, so are innocent mistakes and oversights. Imagine that for whatever reason, an incident occurred. How would that affect your business, and how quickly and confidently could you recover it? According to Veeam’s Salesforce Protection Trends report, 24% of organisations are confident they could restore their data after a faulty data import, while 39-hours is the average time it would take to recover 100 Salesforce accounts and their related records. Any partialness or errors in the recovery process can greatly magnify the impacts, which is exactly why an effective Salesforce recovery solution is essential for enterprises.
So what are the key challenges facing enterprises like yours, and how you can overcome them with an effective strategy?
Enterprise Challenges in Salesforce Data Backup and Recovery
Most enterprises have some kind of business continuity solution in place that includes data backup and recovery plans, but they still face a number of challenges:
Growing data volume
The volume and complexity of the Salesforce data being processed grow in proportion to the enterprise’s success, which can risk gaps in your backup and recovery plan if caution has drifted to the wind. Having the flexibility to conduct granular recoveries amongst this mountain of data also becomes more desirable as the overall data volume grows.
Ensuring data integrity
Coupled with this amassing data, ensuring it is accurate and consistent over its production and backup lifecycle is also critical. For this, rigorous checks and validation processes to ensure data integrity are a must for enterprises, and these checks must be able to give a forest and tree-level view for the best results.
Compliance
Adhering to regulatory requirements is another challenge, with one key issue being striking the balance between data retention and data minimisation; in fact, many organisations are retaining data for shorter periods than recommended by regulators. Audits, staying on top of data handling policies, and effectively adjusting backup solutions according to evolving requirements are just some key concerns here.
Metadata
Crucial too, are the customisations and configurations unique to your Salesforce environment. Gaps in the backup and recovery of Salesforce metadata can be highly disruptive even if your data backup works as planned, being crucial for the functionality of your custom apps, workflows, and interfaces on Salesforce.
Managing Costs
Balancing the cost of comprehensive backup solutions with the need for robust mass data protection is another key concern for your enterprise.
User Training and Risk Reduction
It’s all too common to be concerned with the bits and bytes of your Salesforce backup efforts, but addressing risk reduction across the human element is another key challenge that your enterprise should address.
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How To Create Your Enterprise Salesforce Backup Strategy
The Salesforce Backup and Recovery Plan Journey in a Nutshell
To create a Salesforce backup solution for your business that meets your needs, your journey will involve these key steps.
- Salesforce Data Assessment: Undertaking an inventory of your Salesforce data and metadata to understand what needs to be backed up.
- RPO and RTO Determination: Defining your Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) to align your backup strategy with your business continuity plans.
- Compliance Requirements: Identifying legal and regulatory compliance needs that will affect data storage, retention, and protection.
- Backup Frequency: Decide on backup frequency based on data criticality and change rates.
- Data Storage and Security: Choosing secure and compliant data storage solutions; consider encryption for data in transit and at rest.
- Incremental vs. Full Backups: Striking the balance between full and incremental backups to optimise storage and minimise disruptions.
- Backup Testing: Regularly test backups for integrity and recoverability to ensure data is restorable.
- User Training and Defining Access Controls: Educating users on data handling and implement strict access controls to minimise human error.
- Monitoring and Alerts: Setting up monitoring for backup processes to receive alerts on failures or issues.
- Vendor Selection: Evaluate and select a backup solution provider that meets your Salesforce-specific needs and offers scalability, reliability, and comprehensive coverage.
Step-By-Step Salesforce Backup Guide: for detailed platform-agnostic guidance on creating and implementing a Salesforce backup strategy, see our handy step-by-step guide!
Configuring Your Salesforce Backups for Optimal Performance, Security, and Lower Costs
To maximise the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of your Salesforce backups, it’s crucial to configure them for optimal performance. You can do this using a combination of the following:
- Deploy Incremental Backups: These backups let you focus on saving only new and changed data since the last backup instance, reducing storage space use and backup time.
- Automate Backup Processes: Automatic backups enable you to minimise manual errors and operational disruptions while being an efficient backup method. They can be run during off-peak hours, reducing impacts on system performance and better ensuring data integrity.
- Employ Advanced Encryption Methods: Make sure you use a backup service provider that offers strong AES-256 standard encryption to ensure the security of your data.
- Optimise Storage Solutions: Choose strategies such as tiered storage solutions and implement data deduplication measures to cut costs.
- Monitor and Review Backup Performance: It’s difficult to control and optimise what we cannot see; take care to monitor and review backup performance using periodic audits to ensure efficiency, effectiveness, and compliance.
- Utilise Cloud Backup Solutions: Cloud solutions such as our Salesforce backup service, are highly scalable and cost-efficient, with a range of features to ensure the integrity, efficiency, and security of your Salesforce backup and recovery.
- Data Retention Policies: Combining data retention policies with automated purging systems will help you lower costs as well as keep your backup clean and compliant with regulations such as UK GDPR.
8. Regular Salesforce Recovery Testing: Testing recovery processes ensures that things will go to plan if a recovery is ever needed; ensuring successful recovery will lower any potential costs associated with recovery, validate data integrity, and empower compliance.
Developing Your Salesforce Enterprise Backup Strategy
Conducting a gap analysis is a good way to begin consolidating your Salesforce backup and recovery strategy. If you’re looking to implement your first Salesforce backup solution, having a clear idea of what you need from a business, regulatory and security standpoints will be key.
Secondly, you will want to keep the development of your data backup solution in lock-step with the evolution of your business; for example, any new types of data, software integrations, or metadata implementations should be systematically coordinated with your Salesforce backup processes.
Keep a keen eye on data protection and regulatory compliance as the needs, standards, and expectations connected to ensuring your compliance and cyber security will evolve with the cyber landscape and your business. When was the last time you validated the security posture and compliance of your backup and recovery strategy?
Engage with stakeholders across IT, legal and operational functions in your business to continually align and refine the effectiveness of your backups for your business as a whole.
Is your backup strategy clear and detailed; does it also enshrine accountability with recovery objectives, processes, and clear roles? These key pieces will remove risks, implementation gaps, uncertainty, and save your enterprise time.
Cyber Security Considerations for Enterprise Salesforce Backups
Not all Salesforce data backup and recovery services are equal when it comes to cyber security and empowering regulatory compliance. You’ll want to consider the security of your account, data, and your vendor, with various overlaps between these key areas:
Account Security
Does the provider offer key security measures such as multi-factor authentication and user access controls that you can apply to different accounts? Do they offer features that can ensure transparency and accountability over user activity?
Salesforce Backup Data Security
How comprehensive are the record logging, auditing, and reporting features of the solution? Is the data encrypted to an IES-256 standard? More broadly, it is imperative to consider the wider cyber security posture of your network, endpoints, applications, and users, given that cyber security is a holistic endeavour these days.
Salesforce Backup Vendor Security
Does the vendor secure the data both in transit and in storage to an enterprise standard? Is the vendor or backup location provider ISO27001 certified? Are their staff vetted?
Safeguarding Your Salesforce Data Is Essential; Take the Next Step Today
Your enterprise’s business continuity is of critical importance; loss of data and operational downtime on your Salesforce instance have the potential to cause havoc and a lot more trouble than the risk is worth.
With an effective Salesforce backup and recovery strategy in place, your business will be well-placed to stay on the road no matter the weather and better ensure regulatory compliance posture across your enterprise’s growth journey.
Have Questions About Veeam Backup for Salesforce? Our FAQs Can Help!
Choosing a Salesforce backup solution can be a complex task and it can be hard to find all the information that you need to make a decision. We’ve created our own FAQ guide on Veeam’s backup platform for Salesforce, a global leader in backup solutions for enterprises across the globe. We hope it can help you make an informed and empowering decision.
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.
