Webinar: How to choose a backup solution for Salesforce

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Description

65% of teams reported experiencing at least one data or metadata loss incident last year. Whilst backup solutions can’t guarantee you’ll never experience a loss, they can help teams recover when incidents do occur. That’s why it’s vital to consider a solution that suits your team’s specific Salesforce needs. But how can you ensure you’re making the right decision when sifting through the vast array of backup options on offer?

Join Jack Parkinson, Software Engineer at Gearset as he outlines a framework for evaluating backup solutions tailored to your needs.

In this webinar:

  • Understand the importance of having a reliable backup and recovery strategy
  • Explore common misconceptions about Salesforce data protection
  • Learn about key features to look for in a backup solution
  • Discover how to minimize recovery point and recovery time objectives
  • Gain insights from the latest State of Salesforce DevOps survey.

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Transcript

Hello, Marie. And welcome to this gear set webinar on how to choose the right backup solution, for your Salesforce team. This, roughly twenty five minute session has been designed to offer you a general framework, which you can use when evaluating a backup solution for your company's needs and goals.

And in the process, we will both discuss the importance of having a backup that works for you as well as, challenging some common misconceptions that we have observed, during our time of offering backup solutions.

My name is Jack Parkinson, and I've been working as a software engineer on the backup team here at Gearset for almost a year and a half now. And over that time, I've been, coding features, making improvements aimed at allowing our users to back up and restore their Salesforce data in the simplest and easiest way possible. So let's get started with the webinar.

I would like you all to, imagine this scenario.

You've just got into the office. You've got your coffee or tea ready, and you get a message from one of your Salesforce admins, looking quite panicked, about one of the custom fields being deleted from several key account records.

Now you know from experience of administrating this will have a significant impact on your business's ability to operate. And so now it's all hands on deck to recover this data to minimize the impact on your business.

Now this is a situation no one wants to be in, but, unfortunately, it's a situation that some of you might be, familiar with.

But others on this call will will be wondering if this is a scenario they're likely to find themselves in. Well, each year, we conduct the state of Salesforce DevOps stud survey.

Almost, thirteen hundred Salesforce experts took part this last year. I will leave a QR code on the screen for the next few slides if you'd like to read that report. It highlights how Salesforce teams report performing in twenty twenty four and tracks some trends that are driving better processes and operational performance across industries.

But one questions we asked our participants this past year is whether or not they had experienced data and metadata loss in the past year. Now I'm wondering if anybody has a good, guess in the chat if you'd like to leave a a percentage as to what a percentage of participants said, they'd lost data or metadata in twenty twenty three.

I'll give, some points for the people who get closest.

So we've got a few guesses now. Actually, someone's got it absolutely right. Sixty five percent, which is almost two thirds of our respondents, said they'd lost data over the past year, which I think really highlights how even the best Salesforce admins or users can make mistakes which result in data loss. And and that highlights one of the common misconceptions around Salesforce backup, that being that some people think that, you know, Salesforce automatically backs up your data and metadata due to it being in in the cloud.

But that actually isn't the case. Salesforce stores a single copy of your data, and through their shared data responsibility, it's up to you as users to make your own backups. And so, even small data losses that aren't backed up, with a backup are going to be very difficult to recover from. And for those who are still thinking, well, we've never had an an instant before. Well, our report, unfortunately, showed that, six percent respondents were unsure if they'd suffered a data or metadata loss in the past year. I guess the only thing worse than losing data is not knowing if and when you lost data. I mean, can you be a hundred percent sure that no data's been lost in your org this past year?

I think that highlights how important it is to have good visibility into your data to be able to see what's changed over time and to be able to spot data and metadata losses before they compound in scale.

So now that we've established that data instance are relatively common, what is actual impact of an an instant? Well, firstly, there is a a direct monetary impact. The loss of business critical data doesn't just affect your operations and abilities for your business to function going forward, but it's gonna cost you money in labor with dealing with the instant and the costs of strengthening your admin processes going forward.

There's also a time aspect.

The longer the downtime for your business and the longer it takes to restore your data, the more your business operations will be affected.

Disruption also isn't just money. It's the complexity and stress of having to restore data a metadata as quickly as possible during such a disaster. Unfortunately, with the complexity of of Salesforce's data dependencies, there's always a rare chance of actually making things worse when you're trying to, restore things. And, you know, that's gonna make sales you know, Salesforce admins, grumpy to to go through the restock process, but also everybody on your team, the end user in sales, marketing, customer success. And if you're losing customer data, you might make your customers unhappy, which may cost you, reputational damage or or or trust.

And finally, there's a click compliance issue as well.

All companies will have some compliance regulations they will need to follow, whether that be GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, and those regulations, will impose, severe penalties potentially if your business loses data. And so there's these four clear impacts here, which we're aiming to mitigate through having a backup. Now I realize unlike a lot of business products, back from resource also, something which you you never want to have to use. But when you do inevitably need to use it, you want it to be there for you and to be smooth and streamlined to use. And so you need a good framework when it comes to choosing a Salesforce backup and restore solution to make sure those impacts are eliminated or minimized as much as possible.

But what should such a framework actually look like? Well, any backup and resource solution should be there for you throughout the life cycle of the data recovery process, and it should provide tools throughout to minimize the impact on your business.

So let's think about that life cycle.

Let's look at this handy clock illustration we have here. If we go clockwise from left to right, we can see, that we first initiate a backup run here, and then a couple of hours later, a data instant occurs.

The time between these is the recovery point objective, the RPO, dictating the amount maximum amount of time that could be lost amount of data that could be lost in the case of an instant in hours.

And then on the right, we have a period where the instant is discovered and then remedied some hours later.

The recovery time objective, the RTO, is then the maximum amount of time it would take to restore normal operations following an instant. And so your aim in choosing a backup solution is essentially to minimize the RPO and RTO in order to minimize any disruption, on your business.

Therefore, any backup solution you do will offer you tools to cover that entire data disaster recovery life cycle by offering, first, robust backup tools, which frequently and securely backup your data.

Second, good data and metadata analysis tools that make it painless to explore previous backups, determine at what point the root cause of a failure occurred, and then start to plan out the restore process.

Third, a seamless data, data, metadata restore process that allows you to recover from any issue as quickly and as simply as possible.

And finally, just overall peace of mind. You wanna make sure the org is behaving as expected and is there for you when you inevitably need to use it.

And so we now have four parts of a framework we can now use to ensure any back home resource solution meets our requirements. Now let's dig further into this, framework and offer some features that we believe you should look at, when choosing a backup solution.

Firstly, backup.

We can see on the clock diagram here that we want to be able to reduce the recovery point objective, the RPO here, to minimize that amount of data we're losing between our last backup and an instant occurring. And, therefore, the frequency of your backups is one of the most important factors to consider.

Now this is why backup methods such as Salesforce data exports and using sandbox copies for backup are quite frankly a a really bad solution for data security despite being quite popular approaches.

Salesforce data export has up to a seven day RPO, while sandbox copies have a twenty eight day RPO.

Would you be comfortable losing a week or a month's worth of data in one go if you lose, data?

Good Salesforce backup solutions will offer a daily automated backup scheduled to run at a given time each day, and that will offer you several benefits to manually triggering backups. You have the knowledge that those backups be made regardless if your admins are on holiday or on sick leave, and it allows you to spot anomalies in your org as we will touch on in the latest part.

Note, though, that it's also useful to have the ability to make manual backups when you need to, especially if, for example, you're about to deploy a new feature to your org. And you should make sure that the tool treats those manual runs the same way as automated runs, allowing you to analyze them alongside your automated runs.

For important objects that change often, especially for large businesses, it's also useful to have the option of enabling more frequent backups to capture changes to your org even more granularly and ensuring you lose as little critical data as possible during an instant. Good backup solutions will offer, hourly backups or around that cadence of at least your most business critical and frequently changing objects.

Secondly is what data the backup solution is able to back up. Not only is it possible, important to back up, data records, but also the net data associated with that data. You should specifically check that all the objects that are crucial for your business' operations are both supported and successfully backed up by your backup solution of choice. And that should include any metadata associated with your data objects, metadata only types such as permissions and profiles, and binary objects such as files and attachments.

And as your org evolves and new objects are added, you should make sure that your backup automatically evolves to back those new objects up, making sure that your your backup isn't being left to become out of date with time.

It's actually worth noting, a common misconception here that some users feel that they don't need metadata backups because they can use Git to do this. But with a purpose built Salesforce metadata backup solution, you will avoid the corruption issues that, unfortunately, we've seen plague Git based, backups in the past. And you also gain automatic metadata backups, giving you the peace of mind that your metadata will be backed about regular intervals at the same cadence as your data without the need for team intervention.

There's also the cost structure of the backup solution you are evaluating. You should make sure you don't end up choosing a backup solution whose price will increase significantly as your business grows.

As part of any calculations you make, you should consider how fast your team is growing, how many changes your org experiences, or how big your org is.

And finally, it's worth considering if the backup solution question meets the compliance and security requirements of your business.

This doesn't just mean that it has passed auditing certifications such as ISO twenty seven zero zero one, although, obviously, that's gonna be important.

It's also that the solution offers tools allowing you to meet your own obligations, such as offering GDPR record deletions in your, field backed up data or providing you with the ability to set retention policies on your backups to ensure old data has not been kept longer than prescribed or giving the ability to set granular access controls at a user level to make sure that only authorized users, can perform operations on the data they they're allowed to access.

You should also have the agency and autonomy to manage your own data, maybe allowing you to, you know, delete your own encryption keys on demand or having the option to bring your own key if that's what, your business requires or, being able to make decisions on your data's residency by choosing where your data is being stored.

Going to the, state of Salesforce DevOps report again, fifty five percent of respondents said that data and metadata backup solutions are important to ensure their Salesforce orgs remain compliant.

And so not only considering you know, they don't just consider that your, backup solution offers you the ability to be compliant, but also allows you to continue being compliant going forwards.

However, having your data securely backed up is only part of the battle.

We can all agree that a write only backup is no use to any business. And so it's important that when you're in the middle of a data disaster, you have the tools you need to view your data and diagnose issues as seamlessly as possible.

And throughout our time working with customers on recovering from these scenarios, we've picked upon several data and metadata analysis features that have really improved success of our customers' restores.

One of these in particular is, good visibility into your backed up data. As I mentioned earlier, visibility is crucial. It's no good having a backup if you cannot easily determine if and what you need to restore.

It should ideally offer you one location to view the status of all your backups to ensure quickly that your data is being backed up successfully, and it should also offer multiple views across which you can view your data in order to cater the different restore and investigation scenarios.

In the case of the data or metadata loss incident, you should be able to quickly determine, a, what object's been affected by a loss, b, how many records been affected and what those records specifically are, and, c, then be able to ascertain what point in time you're able to restore from.

Therefore, you should have the ability to search through your backup runs by Salesforce ID or field value. It should be it should offer both object and field level exploration into your data, and it should also offer you a global view of your backup across its history. This one is, particularly useful, for our customers as as we found that's allowed them to spot anomalous events in their org by being able to compare successive backup runs and being able to spot when a large amount of changes have occurred between runs, allowing you to spot those events before their impact compounds massively with time.

It should also proactively alert you when your Salesforce org changes in a significant anomalous way. And importantly, it should do this in the place you are most likely to notice and respond to it. Now that's gonna depend on your team, but it might it might be via email. It might be via SMS message. Maybe it's via a messaging platform of your choice like Slack or Teams or inside Salesforce itself through chatter or platform notifications.

You've gotta make sure that regardless of which one it is, that any solution does integrate with your existing processes because that's gonna make sure that you can spot those issues much quicker before significant amounts of data are lost.

And you should also be able to set your own thresholds as to what notifications are being sent. You wanna be alert about anomalies, but you don't want to create unhelpful noise that's that's going to cloud your ability to spot those anomalies.

It's also useful to get notifications when things are going as expected. For example, good backup solutions will offer a report when your backup job completes to allow you to have that peace of mind to know that a backup configuration is still running as intended.

Finally, any analysis tools provided by a backup solution should be intuitive and easy to use. The most important time that you'll need to use a backup tool is unfortunately when something has gone wrong in your org, and so you want a tool that makes finding issues easy for you and your team. Now, again, this is a a very subjective thing to evaluate. It's going to depend on the scenario you are testing, the objects you're investigating, and the complexity of any analysis you're doing.

And so having a process to be able to figure this out and figure out which one is most intuitive for you is very important. Therefore, when evaluating the data and metadata analysis tools and the resource tools provided by a given backup solution, we recommend this approach, testing the tool with different workflows that mimic a range of likely scenarios that you may need to recover from. A common misconception that we've seen from prospective customers is that you only need to test a backup solution with full org restore scenario. Well, that will not test the precision restore tools that any backup solution might offer, and it will also not test more common scenarios that you might come across, like losing specific fields from an object or a set of objects from your org, where you're gonna want a more streamlined and intuitive workflow that has less configuration and offers some abstractions that you don't need to think about in that stressful time to allow you to get up and running as quickly as possible.

As part of this testing process, we recommend you test, these solutions as a pair. One person should make those initial changes to your org, and the second one should then use the data analysis and restore tools, offered by a solution to try and restore from each of those different scenarios, crucially, without knowing what the original changes are. That makes sure that the tool offers that intuitive user interface that allows you to find the root cause of the problem quickly and then recover effectively.

Speaking of restoring data, there are several features which we consider important to make sure any Salesforce backup solution offers. And one feature, that we've already mentioned, just now that that aids this is offering different workflows for different scenarios, range from, simpler work workflows like restoring specific fields on one object or, one object and any of its dependent records to full restoration workflows designed for complex and broad restore scenarios, you want a tool that offers as much granularity as is required to restore your org for any given scenario, abstracting way complexity for simple scenarios, and then allowing for customization in more complex scenarios. That will allow it to feel more intuitive and easy to use than the solution that only offers one use it every time approach to restoring your data and metadata.

It's also important to consider if a given solution is specifically designed to work with Salesforce or not.

Salesforce data object relationships are notoriously complex, and that can make restore failures more common and harder to recall from, especially when you're using a generic or first party restore solution.

Our reason for this is is the state of Salesforce step ups report again. Forty five percent of users who used third party Salesforce specialist backup and restore solutions were able to recover their data within hours of a data or metadata loss. That's comparing with forty one percent for Salesforce's backroom resource solution, thirty two percent for a third party generic solution, and and just twenty three percent for Salesforce data exports.

That is why we also recommend choosing a solution that offers Salesforce specific reassurance and validation at every step of the process.

That might mean seeing the data or metadata you are about to deploy, offering you lots of information about what operations exactly are gonna be performed on your org before you make any changes, or handling restore validation and other edge cases in a transparent way. To give a, an example, we at GIS that provide problem analyzers that scan your proposed restore operation to anticipate any data restore failures and offer some suggestions on what other objects might need to be deployed to maximize the successful restore. And we also allow you to disable validation rules, triggers, and flows during a restore to prevent those integrations from being bombarded with noise, during a restore.

The reason why I give these as examples is because these are both edge cases that are very specific to Salesforce that any good backup solution will handle transparently or alongside any of reg cases that you might come across. And that's gonna give you the sense of, security and peace of mind in knowing that that tool is is handling, your org, in the the correct way versus something which isn't designed for Salesforce.

We also recommend, choosing a solution that offers an easy and intuitive approach to restore metadata specifically.

As we touched upon earlier, you can restore metadata easily through Git. But when you're in that highly when you're in that highly time sensitive and stressful situation, that may not be the case anymore. You want to have that reassurance and validation offered by a backup restore platform that you are familiar with.

You may be able to do it when you're not stressed, but do you wanna be using that git command line in anger when you need to do that as quickly as possible?

And finally, sandbox seeding from a backup is another useful feature that many of our customers utilize regularly, particularly for testing changes with a fixed set of data. This is something that you should consider and see if it's worth it for you and your workflows.

Finally, there are a few more features of backup and restore solutions that do not fit neatly into the data recovery process, but regardless are important to consider in any backup tool. Any solution should be there for you regardless of it if you're in the middle of a data disaster or if you're just in business as usual operations.

Firstly, you should consider, the support offered by the backup solution, whether it be during initial setup, for queries about various parts of the tool, or for support during a data disaster scenario.

The support offered should at least cover your business hours, and they should offer, good average customer satisfaction ratings and, good average support, response times.

As a rule of thumb, we recommend, tools that offer, response time less than five minutes and at least around ninety five percent, cost of satisfaction rating. And that allows you to have the peace of mind in knowing that those solutions are going to work for you when you need them.

You should also consider if that support is included as standard or if there are any hidden fees or service level agreements that might hid your ability to use that support when you need it.

And finally, check to see if you can try that support during any trials or proof of concept periods.

It's one thing knowing that it's available, but knowing that a company will continue to support you with the same veracity once you become a full fee paying customer is a very important metric to consider.

You should also consider if the given solution is specifically separate from Salesforce or not. It's always beneficial to know and just general good backup practice that your data is securely stored away from its original source and could be accessed and exported even if Salesforce itself is having an issue.

Consider how Swift the backup solution is part of a larger DevOps platform.

When you're utilizing data and message deployments on a regular basis as part of your day to day workflow, then restoring after a major incident becomes way less stressful because, again, you're familiar with those underlying tools and operations.

Any, any solution, you consider should also regularly update itself and evolve with new features as Salesforce evolves.

For example, we it gives that as soon as you're seeing data archiving, as part of our own growing back and restore tooling.

And finally, you should check if the solution question offers a pre a free proof of concept or trial and if that free trial specifically allows you to utilize your real production data or if it is a premade environment they create.

You you know that your org isn't an absolutely perfect utopia. There's always gonna be one or two awkward objects that are crucial for how your business functions that might be a little bit difficult to administrate. And so you want to make sure that any proof of concept you get working make handles your orgs and your data, giving you the confidence both in the product as well as the onboarding process offered and also giving you knowledge that the company has faith in their products.

And so this is the framework, a list of features that we recommend following when choosing a backup solution that works for you. We should note that these features we listed are not exhaustive. There are obviously gonna be other features that you may be considering for you and your business.

But to avoid yourself from feature listing, you should consider how those desired features fit specifically into this framework.

Do they help directly reduce your RPO and RTO in the case of a data or metadata instant, or are they more for peace of mind and fitting in with your existing processes?

Once you know where they fit in this framework and if they fit in this framework, you can then start to prioritize and refine what you need in a solution to minimize that panic during a data disaster and maximize your peace of mind.

And so if you want to get that peace of mind and get started evaluating a backup tool, you can test Gearset's features, including back on restore for thirty days using our free trial.

You can, start a free trial by scanning the left QR code. But if you just wanna speak to us or contact us about a demo or just have any other queries, you can speak to us with the right QR code.

And so that is, the end of the webinar for today. Thank you everybody for attending. I will leave the floor open now for any questions you might have, for me or Nick, either on, backup and restore solution or just evaluation practices in general. Thanks very much.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Jack. So, we do have time, I think, for one quick question that's come up here in, the q and a.

So Martin has asked, what's your advice on quantifying the ROI on one backup solution versus another?

Oh, okay. Good question.

I I know we have somewhere on the, get a case at website, a white paper that we released, which was, a a backup ROI, guide. I don't know if someone's able to get that up while I answer the question.

But in general, I guess the the things you have to consider is, what is it gonna cost you to lose data? We've seen, earlier with the, sixty five percent of users losing data, that, you know, it's likely to happen at least, once in a year that you're gonna lose some amount of data, whether that be a small amount of data or a large amount of data. So you need to consider for each backup solution you look at, how long it's gonna take you to get up and running and back to where you need to be. And that will differ from backup tools, backup tool. And then quantify in cost how much that's gonna cost you, and your business, and fight and, you know, in respond and, as well as that, you need to take into account, if that, you know, backup tool works for you and your team.

I say just my personal advice is just give the, backup solutions you're looking at, a fair go. Give them a proof of concept. Give them, you know, in our case, look at our trial, and just try them out for yourself and make that decision based on what works for you.

And that that will often answer your question, you know, alongside any ROI calculations you're making.

Awesome. I think that is all we have time for today. So thanks everyone for, attending and for getting involved in the chat. It's been great to hear from you all.

And once again, a big thank you to Jack for running today's session. It was really informative, a great session. And thanks as well to Nick for monitoring the chat and q and a as we've gone along. So I shall let everyone get on with, their day.

Thanks so much for joining.

Thank you very much for coming.