How to measure the ROI of a Salesforce backup and recovery solution

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Description

Unlock the true value of your Salesforce backup solution. In this webinar, Laurence Boyce, Sales Engineer at Gearset, discusses how to measure the ROI of your Salesforce backup.

  • Understand the costs associated with data and metadata loss
  • Explore key metrics like RPO and RTO to assess your backup strategy
  • Learn about compliance benefits and how backup supports agile development
  • Discover how to justify your backup budget effectively

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Transcript

So thank you all for joining our our webinar today. I'm really excited to talk to you about how you can measure the value of your backup solution and make sure that you're getting the most out of Salesforce backup. I'll be chatting for about fifteen minutes before we move on to a quick demo of how you can use Salesforce backup to promote ROI. There'll also be time later on for a q and a at the end of the session.

As a brief introduction, hi. I'm I'm Lawrence. I'm a sales engineer here at Gearset responsible for leaving the technical side of working with customers to evaluate their current business processes and challenges and advising when and how Gearset could be a good solution. If so, I'll then work with those customers to map out how Gearset can align with those use cases to achieve the correct technical outcomes.

Personally, I've had a number of years working in the SaaS backup space, so I'm familiar with many of the challenges that Salesforce teams have with regard to data and metadata backup and the potential solutions to address these.

You'll also see and also in the chat here, one of our technical writers, Eliza, is around to answer any questions that you have, and we'll also have time at the end for more questions and a more interactive q and a, but please continue to use the chat.

So backup is a huge topic that sits at the heart of many Salesforce teams' priorities. So this webinar really will be useful to those looking to learn more about backup for Salesforce, those considering the costs and benefits of backup, maybe people trying to win over budget for backup spend internally, and those looking to see also maybe what Gearset has on offer in that regard.

As a way of introduction or reminder then, let's begin by running through why we actually need a Salesforce backup solution in the first place.

From sales targets to marketing campaigns, Salesforce underpins core business functions and revenue streams. In fact, ninety eight percent of teams report that Salesforce is critical to business objectives.

So with Salesforce at the heart of your organization, you don't wanna risk any disruption to your orgs.

Though some believe that Salesforce is immune to losses because it's cloud based, unfortunately, it's just not the case.

This is because Salesforce subscribes to what's called the shared responsibility model.

This means that while Salesforce are responsible for the security and availability of the platform, you are responsible for ensuring that your data stored within Salesforce is protected.

This means that you, and you alone really, are responsible for backing up your Salesforce data and, of course, metadata too.

And it is necessary to back up your Salesforce instance because data and metadata are liable to a a range of threats spanning from malicious attacks to a release that just doesn't quite work as expected.

As a result, seventy one percent of Salesforce teams reported they had at least one data or metadata loss just last year in twenty twenty two.

Despite the real risk of Salesforce data and metadata loss, the majority of Salesforce teams still don't actually back up their business critical data and functions. This is either because they don't realize the real risk of data and metadata loss or because they're struggling to justify spend.

So more and more professionals in the ecosystem are actually becoming aware that there's a risk of data and metadata loss, and there's a ton of material out there that dives into the various causes of Salesforce disruption.

So today, we're gonna focus on how you can anticipate the cost of Salesforce losses and understand the value associated with backup.

Given the role then of Salesforce for your business' productivity and revenue, teams know that Salesforce data loss can be expensive, but the cost of this loss are a little nebulous.

In general, the cost of Salesforce data loss is increasing with research showing that this is at around eleven percent year on year.

This is because we're all storing more and more data and becoming increasingly reliant on that data for our businesses.

While it's difficult to predict what elements of data loss will be the priciest, there are some general guides out there that can help you.

At a high level, the breakdown of costs will look something like this.

Approximately thirty five percent of the costs are direct to the business. These are the immediate effects of that data loss, namely Salesforce data.

Fifty two percent then of these will be indirect, stalls to your development or end users when you experience data loss and downtime. An opportunity cost then are an added twelve percent, stemming from the lost leads that you would have generated or sales you would have closed during that period.

This also includes the impact of any reputational damage on your future business.

So so far, we've only looked at the cost of data loss. But in the Salesforce context where metadata config takes up the majority of your developers' time and is what structures your org for end users, we have to look at metadata loss too.

Many teams fail to consider the costs of metadata loss, which means they fail to protect this critical element of their instance and then undersell the need for backup budget.

Because of the intrinsic relationship between Salesforce data and metadata, metadata corruption or deletion commonly has severe knock on implications to your data.

Losing metadata also waste developer time as they'll have to go back and rebuild these fundamental building blocks that shape your org.

And while your development team are focusing on recovering from this metadata loss, all of your other development work will be delayed, maybe missing project deadlines or preventing delivering value to those Salesforce end users.

For Salesforce, these metadata losses are actually the main cause of the indirect cost that we've already highlighted, accounting for over fifty percent of these.

So metadata loss has to be taken seriously as a business disruption.

As you can see then, the cost of data and metadata loss are hugely variable.

This means that teams often allocate too little attention, time, or budget to preventing and recovering them from these losses because they can't fully grasp what the potential could be.

But there's another side to this story, which is that Salesforce teams and vendors alike tend to frame backup solely in a negative light.

It's generally spoken about in the context of devastating data or metadata loss that stalls your instance.

This fear of losing your data or metadata may be enough to convince you to spend on backup, but it's important to recognize that there are wider benefits to Salesforce backup that go far beyond just protecting you in a worst case scenario.

I'm going to use the rest of our time here to go through those in some more detail, but it's worth me highlighting now that failing to recognize the wider benefits of backup means you won't be getting full value out of the solution you choose, and you'll also be limited in the budget you may be able to ask for.

So let's highlight the lesser talked about benefits of a backup solution then.

Of course, the main motivation for backing up your data and metadata will be to mitigate the impacts of losses like those that we've already talked about, but there are a lot of other pains that can be solved and the value that you can get.

Compliance regulations are at the core of business requirements but are a regular blocker, with forty four percent of teams reporting that they failed an audit, internal or external, just within their cloud environments in twenty twenty two.

So choosing the right backup solution will give you firm control of the data within your backups and will also enable you to meet data inquiry and deletion expectations.

A backup solution not only helps you remain compliant, but also gives you a complete audit trail so you can easily demonstrate your compliance also.

Your backup solution should help you assess and audit all of your backup history, saving you that cost of labor during the compliance process.

While it's hard to quantify the value of your business's reputation and customer trust, we know that these are integral to generating and retaining customers.

A backup solution that fortifies your compliance certifications and effectively minimizes Salesforce data and metadata loss further helps strengthen your brand.

Backup also supports Salesforce teams in implementing agile development and DevOps practices.

The knowledge that production and other environments are always safely secured in a backup and can be quickly restored promotes a frequent release cycle, allowing you to benefit and begin reaping the benefits of agile development processes.

These benefits can help you maximize the ROI of your investment in of your existing investment in Salesforce by streamlining both auditing and development on the Salesforce platform.

While all of this sounds great, we know that setting the budget and gaining support for any implementation relies on solid evidence.

Luckily, there are several ways to calculate how backup spend can save you money and generate value.

One way to consider this is through the classic backup metrics of RPO and RTO.

RPO, which stands for recovery point objective, considers the point of your most recent data backup.

It's a measure of how frequently you're backing up your Salesforce data and metadata.

And the longer you go without a backup, the more data and metadata, naturally, you're at risk of losing.

There's also the RTO metric, which is recovery time objective. This is the time taken to spot a data loss, recover that data, and get your system up and running normally.

Using these two metrics combined then to assess your backup solution will allow you to estimate how much data or metadata you could possibly lose and how long this this could store your operations.

From this, you can get a good working idea of how disruptive a data or metadata loss could be for your business.

As a result, the ROI of back of a backup solution is partly made up of the avoided costs of downtime, losses, and wasted developer time if you needed to recover.

You can also measure the ROI of your backup solution by considering the future cost that it could be saving you. If you currently have a Salesforce backup solution, I want you to just ask yourself how much it would cost you to increase the amount you're backing up as your Salesforce instance continues to grow.

With many self built backup solutions or tiered payment plans, as you increase the scale of your backup, you'll find yourself paying far more for storage fees.

So it's worth considering the projection of your Salesforce's instance instances size and the backup capacity you'll need going forwards when weighing up the costs of your options.

You'll find that backup solutions with unlimited storage quickly pay for themselves as your business grows.

It's also worth considering how easy it will be to onboard others with your backup solution in the future.

So as your Salesforce team grows or changes, you'll need to scale the number of people managing that backup instance.

So this can be a real headache if it takes a long time to get to grips with your backup processes and tooling.

So it's worth investigating, investing in a solution that provides intuitive workflows and comprehensive support to you not only now but in the future too.

As I wanted to highlight slightly earlier, there really are wider benefits to backup as it promote promotes compliance, customer trust, and agile development.

And there are actually a few different ways that you can highlight the avoided costs and benefits of putting backup to work for the whole business.

Compliance fines are ever increasing with the fine for a single GDPR breach now sitting as high as twenty million euros.

So there's clear business value in protecting against this liability through a robust backup and recovery solution.

There's also continuous proof that agile development teams are more productive, deliver more value to end users, and thus generate greater ROI.

And finally, a backup solution that allows you to protect customer data and recover from any data loss incidents will foster trust from customers and improve your business's reputation, generating long lasting relationships and future sales.

These are all measurable and core business metrics then that you can use to highlight when evaluating your current approach or looking at new backup solutions.

So we hope that with these metrics for the ROI of Salesforce backup, you'll be able to better make the case for a backup spend and pick the right solution.

At that point then, I'm going to pause and move into a demo, but I would just like to quickly remind you that we've got the chat available, so please continue to put q and a in there, whether directly to Eliza or myself or share with the wider group.

This is Gearset. Gearset sits externally to Salesforce, hosted on AWS, actually leveraging many of the same data centers and servers that Salesforce use for their own processing too. But, crucially, GSET is separate to Salesforce. Fundamental for any backup and recovery solution is to have that data sort of platform.

We can see here then that I have one single pane of glass to view all of my environments, whether it's a production or maybe sandbox environment, backed up daily, or even hourly. So Gearset gives me that higher frequency of backup availability for my most critical object.

Maybe I have patient records or transactional information that I need to keep that hourly snapshot of, and that's where Gearset can support me.

Jumping into any of these backup jobs, because Gearset believes that data and metadata are so intrinsically linked. We combine not only data but metadata in each of these jobs.

Data here is obviously including files and attachments, so they're all backed up, stored, and restorable when required.

You'll see this visual graph which shows how my environment is evolving over time and shows me any new, changed, or deleted records on a snapshot by snapshot basis.

Metadata deletion or corruption, as we mentioned earlier, is often the cause of data loss, and many teams don't actually have a way to either identify or restore metadata corruption.

So by jumping into the metadata tab here, Gearset is running a continual daily monitoring on each of my orgs. So he's taking a snapshot of all of the metadata that sits in these environments and will present to me if the metadata has changed or it's just the same as it was before.

If in any particular scenario, the metadata has been seen as changed, We'll highlight a difference here. And by simply viewing the changes, this will then be able to show me exactly what was changed or removed since that previous snapshot run.

This is great so that I can see exactly, is this what I expected? Maybe I was running a deployment or something untoward taken place.

But not only can I identify this and I get the granularity to see right down to the field view on this layout as an example what's been deleted, but if something untoward has occurred, I simply want to roll this back?

And by rolling back then, I get the full ability because Gearset has such a fundamental understanding of Salesforce metadata.

I can roll back all metadata supported via the Salesforce metadata API, and I can do this one by one. Maybe I just want to restore a few pieces that have been changed, or maybe I wish to roll back everything.

Gearset enables me to do this. And once I've selected the items that I wish to roll back, I simply can select next to restore this metadata, those foundational building blocks for my org.

But Gearset has built in proprietary problem analysis and is saying to me, Lawrence, this is going to be unsuccessful, and it's showing me exactly why with this problem analysis.

I'm immediately told that I've actually not included the opportunity marketing layout that is fundamental for this restoration to be successful. However, Gearset streamlines this for me.

At this point then, I can simply move to the predeployment summary, give this a name, any notes as well associated with this rollback, as well as tying to a Jira ticket if I wish.

I can then validate and simply deploy that metadata back into my environment to get back to the state that I was before any corruption occurred.

That's great, though, to restore the metadata, but then what about my data from there?

Data loss can be identified here by any of these red elements that highlight to me that some records have been deleted.

But, additionally, smart alerts can be configured to proactively notify you via email or even Slack or Microsoft Teams channels when specific criteria are triggered.

So this means that you're practically notified and can take the appropriate remediation actions immediately.

But often with data loss or corruption, you may not know when this occurred.

So having a powerful search capability is fundamental.

So Gearset enables me to search across all of my backup runs for a term, whether it matches the entire account field or not in this instance. And I can see here that I had an account called Millie Morris that was added, captured again, couple of changes occurred, and then a deletion actually occurred yesterday morning at two AM.

To restore this, it's a matter of clicks with Gearset. By viewing this backup run, I get taken straight to the snapshot where the deletion occurred. I don't have to try and find that myself.

I can then either restore en masse or just the records that I wish to restore.

Gearset understands that Salesforce is a hierarchical database. So when you delete a parent account that Millie was in that in that example, a cascade deletion will occur in Salesforce. So any child objects, relationships, and associated records will also be deleted.

But GISS understands those relationships and will show those to me here and enable me to selectively pick those up and choose those as part of my restoration.

On the right hand side, I can preview the records if I wish to check what these are. But when I'm ready, I can simply continue.

When we were looking at the metadata, we saw Gearset has built in proprietary problem analysis to ensure that this restoration is successful.

That's great for metadata, but what we're seeing here is the same is built for data.

Meaning that I don't need a full understanding of my Salesforce data structure structure because Gearset will identify this for me.

So here, I'm showing that, again, Lawrence, this is going to be unsuccessful. You've trying to you're trying to deploy a contact role without the associated opportunity and, again, an account without its parent account.

But because Gears understands this data structure, I can simply bring those along with one click.

From here then, I can simply move ahead, disable any validation rules, triggers, or workflows if required, and then deploy that data back into my environment.

So it's just the number of clicks to restore any deleted data, but the same is true for changed data as well.

Maybe an integration has gone awry or a deployment. So here we can see I have a post deployment snapshot, and I can jump in here to view any changes.

I get my new, changed, and deleted records highlighted to me immediately.

And for any of my objects, I can view these records and then jump to the changed records if I wish to investigate some potential corruption.

At this point then, I can make I can choose as many records as I wish to restore and then select just the fields that I wish to roll back.

Here, I know for as part of my deployment, I accidentally updated all of the names on my records, so I choose the name field.

The phone number changes, they're legitimate, so I can leave those alone.

I can again then plan this restoration to revert this data back to how it was before the corruption occurred.

So it's just a matter of clicks then, as we've seen, to not only restore data from a deletion scenario, but also from a corruption scenario too.

Additionally, Gearset supports a more big bang approach.

So for any of these snapshots, I can go back in time.

A customer I was speaking to just earlier today, actually, described this as Gearset's time machine feature.

So here, I've got a free deployment snapshot, and I can simply restore all of my data back to that point in time if I wish to roll this back to get all of that data back into my org. And the same can be said for metadata. I could download this if I wish, or maybe I wish to just push this data or metadata into a separate environment just to make sure that the restoration is as I expected before I proceed.

ESET supports all of these options, giving me full control of how I wish to do that restoration.

So I appreciate that was a very quick overview on some of Gearset's backup solution. However, I hope that's given you a good flavor on how we can not only provide data and metadata backup as well as those really simple restoration pathways.

Just wanna take a pause at that point as we've got a couple of minutes left.

Couple of questions. Please continue to ask questions in the chat. We'd love to, we'd love to, take those. Elijah and I will be staying on after the webinar, so, if anyone wants to stay around, please do.

Continue to put questions in the chat.

But one thing I'd like to highlight is if anyone would be interested in signing up for a totally free trial, no commitments, just navigate to gear set dot com.

You'll see at the top right, you'll have start free trial. That will give you access to Gearset to be able to test out the capabilities we've seen today.

So on that note, we're gonna open up for q and a, and just want to thank everyone again for joining. Hope that's been useful and been informative for you, and really look forward to working with you going forward.

What questions have we got in the chat, Eliza?

Is it best if I I'll read them to you and and let you let you answer them. There's loads that came in on that demo with some more questions.

So the first we have is, are the snapshots stored in your third party integration platform such as GitHub repository?

So the metadata snapshots and the data snapshots purely from a backup perspective here, these will be stored on the AWS data center that you specify when you onboard with Gearsan. So that could be the US. It could be EU or Australasia.

If you wish then to put those into your repo, maybe you're using a GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, etcetera, that also can be moved across into your version control provider using Gesset. So Gesset will be able to support you with that too.

And the next question we had was, are there any limitations with regard to backing up Salesforce records and metadata that are related to, for example, a managed package?

So GSET backs up all data that sits on the force dot com platform. So depending on exactly the managed package that's in that's in scope there, so please reach out to me, maybe via email, and we can discuss specific managed packages or drop that one in in the chat.

What we often see with managed packages, though, Pardot is a great example, would be that there's actually an integration or connector. So even some packages that sit externally to force dot com, that data is often synchronized across to force dot com and thus captured in the backup.

All, all we're doing there is unfortunately working with some API limitations, meaning that it's just not possible to capture data sometimes that are SAT off platform.

And then we had a further question, which is, does the continuous snapshot that runs in the background count against your environment data limits?

So I guess environment data limits there are referring to APIs. So that would be yes. So when we're running the backups there, that will be it is an API call into your Salesforce org.

From my experience and for a rough estimation for you, a daily backup run will use about six to eight, maybe ten percent of your API allowance. So that is should give you a good estimate of what you should be able to expect with Gearset connected to your org as as a backup tool.

Should also note, though, that Gearset has a built in API cap that you can implement to say, if you get over twenty percent, forty percent, a percentage, stop. And we will always honor that so we don't just fire through all of the API allowance that you have.

Okay. And then the next question is somewhat a question for me because this is based off of some research I've been doing. So oh gosh, I've lost it now. The question was, these are all good inputs to calculating ROI, but have you tried that with any actual data to prove what the monetary value of backup or ROI of backup is?

The answer to that is that it's hugely dependent team by team. It's dependent on how they're using backup. So I know that doesn't sound like a particularly helpful answer because it's not not really giving you an indication. But what I will say is, firstly, I'm dropping this link in the chat.

This is some kind of headline stats that we have and we know from our guests that users, for example, hours saved and kind of productivity savings we know are user experience.

We also have several case studies specifically with customers using backup, and we have created kind of a framework for assessing what ROI could be. So if you want to get in touch with me or speak to, like, say, someone in sales who could look at what you're using at the moment, then we could probably give you a more accurate answer. We just don't want to give a kind of misleading headline that works really well for a small team, but then in a larger team wouldn't really be valid. But we can get you answers on those things. We just want to make sure it's tailored and not not misleading.

I don't know if you have anything to to add to that, Lawrence.

Yeah. I I think as Eliza's posted there, that's gearset dot com slash trust, and that's, you know, a key element that Gearset believe in. You know, we want to be open, want to be honest, and we can't give hard figures without a little bit more information. So plea please do either drop myself, Eliza, or one of the team aligned, get in touch in in some way, and we'll be able to work with you and and get harder, more defined metrics for you.

Yeah. And it's worth me saying that research will be emailed to you all after this webinar, you can look into it in more detail and the sources. Once you've read through that, all the sources will direct you to places where you can kind of see and plug in maybe your own interest into that and see how it could work.

Okay.

We have another question on the technicalities of backup, which is All good. Can we see a history of all the changes that have happened to a record?

Because the changes may be across multiple backups.

Absolutely. So when we look at any record, we'll get a snapshot between sorry. We'll get a view into when they were created, maybe not changed for a long period of time, maybe a couple of changes. And then, ultimately, if a deletion has occurred, you'll see that. So you will see a full audit on the record level to any changes when it was created and then ultimately deleted. But crucially, no changes as well are highlighted in there. Yeah.

And finally, this is a question about the way that our licensing works, which is what is the difference between a platform and deployment team license?

So that is so let let's just pivot slightly from that question to when we're talking about backup here.

So there are two, or three tiers to our backup pricing. There is a starter tier, a Teams tier, and an enterprise tier. The tier of recommendation really will depend on your exact business requirements, the workflows that you're looking to achieve, as well as how much metadata you wish to, be able to manipulate, restore as part of the Gearset solution, but also be able to monitor that metadata for changes and be proactively alerted. That's around the Teams license of of the backup tool.

On the question, I think that might be between the star, platform deployment teams, licenses. So the separate part now of Gearset. So for the attendees on the call, Gearset is not just a backup solution. We're a full DevOps platform founded on deploying Salesforce metadata between orgs, between environments, and really streamlining that process.

But a DevOps solution encompasses backup, sandbox seeding, and other capabilities too. So we're a full platform. And when it comes to the differences of the platform and deployment teams licenses, couple of those then would be around the rollback as well as scheduling deployments. If you wish to have the ability to also clone and combine multiple deployments maybe from a dev to UAT environment, combine those into a production release that would, for example, be part of the Teams licensing.

What would be best? I can see in the chat, it's anonymous attendee.

If you were to just drop Eliza or myself a line, happy to jump in with with you into that in a bit more detail depending on your exact use cases, and then we can flesh out. Is starter right, Teams, enterprise based on the the exact requirements? So would that would be great if possible.

Perfect. Thank you. No. Brilliant.

Fantastic.

And I think that that is all the questions. If anyone else has anything else that they'd like to ask, again, just keep rolling them in or you can email us at any time, and we'll be sending a follow-up email as well just with some direction to further resources and a recording of the webinar in case there's anything else you want to watch again or share with others in your your teams.

Fantastic. Thanks, Eliza. Well, to everyone on the webinar, thank you very much for joining, not only joining, but engaging in the chat, q and a as well. As I mentioned, if you go to gearset dot com, top right, you've got the option for start free trial.

There'll also be a whole heap of content be sent out to you off off the back of this just to, give you the resources and materials that we've gone through today. But on that note, I just wanna wish everyone great Wednesday, whether it's the early morning for you, lunchtime, or evening. Have a great rest of your day. Look forward to working with you all soon, and thanks very much again.

Bye bye.