Strategies for safeguarding your Salesforce Org

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Description

In this webinar, Laurence Boyce, Sales Engineer at Gearset, discusses critical strategies for safeguarding your Salesforce org through effective backup and recovery practices. Discover why a dedicated backup solution is essential for protecting your data and metadata.

  • Understand the importance of Salesforce backup solutions and the risks of data loss
  • Explore the costs associated with data and metadata loss in Salesforce
  • Learn best practices for implementing a robust backup and recovery strategy
  • Hear a customer success story showcasing the benefits of Gearset’s backup solution

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Transcript

So thanks everyone for for joining, and really appreciate you tuning in today for the second episode in our end to end Salesforce data control series. And this really is around four strategies for safeguarding your Salesforce org.

And before we get started, I know mentioned just a second ago, but there is a q and a available. So if you have any questions throughout, please file them in the in the chat. We will be answering them in real time at the end. So this isn't prerecorded.

It's a live, so all of your questions will be answered.

Before we get started, just a a quick intro to myself. I know many people I could I can see are actually working with or have worked with. Good to meet you. I'm Lawrence. I sit in the, sales engineering team here at Gearset. So responsible for supporting customers throughout their technical evaluation of Gearset from maybe initial, conversations right through to implementation, if that's where we get to.

As we mentioned, we're gonna be focusing on that on that, data recovery and backup part today. Really. But before we do that, let's firstly recap together some of what we covered in the first episode around what is a data life cycle management process.

And we all heard the stats around data volumes increasing at an exponential rate, especially in the cloud, where it's predicted that by the end of twenty twenty four, there'll be over one hundred trillion gigabytes of data stored.

And we see this in the Salesforce context with reports, cases, and integrations.

So having more and more data is great, but maximizing the effectiveness of this is by no means a simple task.

So organizations like yours need a strategy to define how to manage data throughout its life cycle from creation to deletion and all of the steps in between.

And that process is commonly known as a data life cycle or a DLM process.

And based on that, then it's it's sort of fair to ask who should implement one of these processes.

And while this should be a consideration for all organizations, it's especially such for those with a lot of data flowing into Salesforce, perhaps causing large data volumes maybe with external integrations, and those subject to regulation or compliance requirements in sectors such as health care or central government and from financial services to pharmaceuticals.

And these regulations such as GDPR or HIPAA are expansive, but failure to comply can lead to severe financial, legal, and reputational damage.

And today, we're gonna be focusing on that third stage of the data life cycle management process in usage and analysis, where we'll be discussing a key part of this, managing your data and disaster recovery planning and, of course, the strategy that sits behind that.

But before we do that, as a way of maybe introduction or reminder, let's begin by running through together why we need a Salesforce backup solution.

And 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 their business objectives.

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

And though some believe that Salesforce is immune to losses because it's cloud based, unfortunately, this is not the case. And one thing that we hear really commonly is there's a backup in Salesforce. Right?

And this, unfortunately, just isn't true. As Salesforce subscribes to what's called the shared responsibility model, and this means that whilst Salesforce are responsible for the security and availability of the platform, You are responsible for ensuring that all of your data stored in Salesforce is protected.

So that means that you and you alone are responsible for backing up your Salesforce data and metadata.

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

And as a result, seventy one percent of teams reported that they had at least one data or metadata loss last year. So despite the real risk of Salesforce data and metadata loss, the majority of teams still don't use a backup solution to protect their business critical data and functions.

And this is either because teams don't realize the real risk of data and metadata loss on Salesforce, or perhaps they're struggling to justify the spend.

So on that note, you know, given the role of Salesforce for your business's productivity and revenue, even though more and more professionals in the ecosystem are be are becoming aware that there's a risk, the implications or the associated costs of this are often a little nebulous.

And in general, the Salesforce, the cost of Salesforce data loss is increasing with research showing that this is rising at around eleven percent year on year. And this is primarily because we're all storing more and more data in our Salesforce instances and becoming more and more reliant on that data to make informed business decisions.

And while it's hard to predict what elements of data loss will be the priciest, there are some general guidelines that can help you out.

So at a high level, the breakdown of costs associated with data loss will look something a little like this.

Thirty five percent of those costs are direct to the business, and these are the immediate effects of the data loss, namely that lost Salesforce data. But fifty two percent of these are indirect, So these might be the stalls to your development or end users when you experience that loss or downtime.

An opportunity costs are at about an additional twelve, so that's stemming from the lost leads you may have generated or sales you would have closed during that period of loss or downtime. And this, of course, also, includes the impact of the reputational damage on future business.

And, unfortunately, outages and catastrophic events just do happen. But it also goes unnoticed that instead of platform level outages, the biggest threat to the security of your data, in fact, comes from inside the business.

And these risks span from malicious attacks to releases that don't quite work as expected.

In fact, in GESET's most recent state of Salesforce DevOps survey, a huge sixty five percent of teams reported they had a data loss incident in the previous year.

And even perhaps more worryingly, a further six percent didn't know whether they'd experienced an incident or even had a way to know.

A very recent scenario occurred where a customer's integration had inadvertently corrupted thousands of contacts, but, thankfully, they had a backup solution in place so it could roll that back to a previous state, resolve the issue with the troublesome integration, and redeploy this.

So that's just one example of where a backup and recovery solution was critical in that possibly disastrous situation. So, of course, that's an element of operational resiliency.

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

And many teams may fail to consider the cost of metadata loss, which means that they'll fail to protect this critical element of their Salesforce incident.

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

And losing metadata, of course, also wastes developer time as they'll have to go back and rebuild these fundamental building blocks that shape your Salesforce org.

And while your development team are focusing on recovering from this metadata loss, all of your other development work may be delayed or stalled, may be causing you to miss project deadlines or preventing you from delivering value to your own users.

And for Salesforce, these metadata losses are the main cause of that indirect cost that we saw earlier, with this accounting for over fifty fifty percent of the cost of an incident. So because of this, of course, metadata loss has to be taken seriously as a business disruption.

And speaking to this, here's a quote I wanted to share from our state of Salesforce DevOps survey.

So when asked what's a piece of advice you'd give to a team implementing Salesforce, This respondent called out, you know, just don't assume that Salesforce provides any and every feature that you need to run your organization.

So, of course, they have a plan for release management, metadata and data backup, retention, etcetera.

So really highlighting there that, you know, Salesforce out of the box has this fantastic platform to be able to use as a basis to customize and build upon. But it's not by no means a finished product, and that's why all of us, of course, build, develop, and customize the Salesforce instance to our needs. So that means it's even more of a requirement to have a metadata and data backup in place.

So with with this in mind, now what can you actually do about having or looking at one of these solutions?

There's really a few options. So firstly, there are a few potential solutions provided by Salesforce directly, be that the weekly export or other data exporting methods.

However, these are not commonly able to fully align with business requirements.

So this is why there's a a few third party solutions, some generic and some more dedicated to Salesforce.

Generic tools may seem appealing as your organizations may already have an existing relationship with those sorts of vendors. For example, you might be doing backups for your on premise servers, maybe Google Cloud or o three sixty five services, for example.

But dedicated backup and restore tools designed specifically for Salesforce tend to offer significant advantages over generic tools, such as understanding the complex dependencies and hierarchies that occur due to the intricate nature of Salesforce data and metadata structures.

And that means, of course, that specialist tools are built to understand and manage these relationships, ensuring complete and accurate backups, and more importantly, restorations.

And unlike generic tools, Salesforce focused solutions typically allow for more precise record level restoration, making it easier to recover individual records or metadata components without impacting the wider scope of York.

And as we talk about metadata there, specialist tools will typically handle metadata such as your custom objects, your workflows, your rules alongside the data, ensuring a comprehensive backup and seamless restoration of your Salesforce environment if the worst were to ever occur.

And, also, specialist tools will integrate deeply with the Salesforce APIs, offering maybe faster or more reliable backups and reducing the risk of hitting any API limits or, governor limits there or even timeouts that you may encounter.

And, of course, on this specialist side is where gearset fits in.

But let's also highlight some of the potentially lesser talked about benefits of backup.

Of course, the main motivation for backing up your Salesforce data and metadata will always be to mitigate the impact and costs of losses.

There's actually a load of other pain points that can be solved and value added that you can get out of your backup solution.

So compliance is a core business requirement, but it's sometimes a blocker to business transformations with forty four percent of teams reporting that they failed an audit, either internal or external in their cloud environments.

So choosing the right backup solution will give you firm control of your data within your backups and will also enable you to meet any data inquiry and deletion expectations, providing full order history, saving you a lot of manual work during any compliance processes.

And 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. So a backup solution that fortifies your compliance certifications and minimizes Salesforce data and metadata loss further helps strengthen your brand.

And, additionally, any solution that supports Salesforce teams in implementing an agile development and DevOps process provides the knowledge that maybe providing developers with that knowledge that maybe production and other environments are always being safely stored and backed up is helpful to promote a perhaps frequent release cycle, allowing your businesses to begin reaping the benefits of agile development.

And these benefits can help you maximize your ROI of your existing investment in Salesforce by streamlining development on the platform.

So based on all of this, it'd be fair to ask, like, what would be some backup and recovery best practices for Salesforce?

So firstly, any backup solution for any software, not just Salesforce, should be built separately from its original data source. And that's a fundamental requirement for any backup solution, so naturally then that applies to Salesforce too.

The security of your data is critical, so ensure that any solution you choose aligns with your compliance requirements and uses industry leading protocols for securely handling your business data.

And Salesforce is a unique platform that has many nuances when it comes to backup and especially restoration.

So due to this, we recommend selecting a backup solution dedicated to Salesforce who understand those intricacies to help, ensure you're able to restore successfully if required.

Data, including files and attachments, and the better data are intrinsically linked.

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

So this ties into a method for being proactively notified if data loss or corruption incidents occur. And going back to that stat earlier on with seven percent of teams just not knowing if they've had an incident. It's quite worrying. Right?

And, of course, even if you have those alerts, you want these to be delivered by the communication channels that you use most often, whether that be email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, etcetera.

And when you invest in a solution, you want this to be an automated process without any reliance from your team, And they should also align with your targets for your RPO and RTO to your recovery point and recovery time objectives respectfully.

So if you have a RPO, for example, of one hour, this means that your solution must be able to back up your Salesforce environment hourly. So ensure any solution aligns with this.

But if a data or metadata issue is encountered, these are highly stressful and time sensitive situations. So you want the confidence that you're able to be supported when required by real people, not just with backup expertise, but Salesforce expertise too.

And finally, pricing.

Predictability is crucial when financial planning, and solutions that charge on a consumption basis may leave you in an uncertain position here. So per user pricing or a pricing model that scales, Azure all does, will give you that predictability to grow your solution in line with your business growth.

And, of course, all of these are available within tools such as Gear Sets backup and recovery solution, which we'll have a quick look at in just a few minutes. But before we do, I want to share a brief customer story from Sage, an organization I'm sure we've all heard of and perhaps use every day. But if you've not heard of them, Sage is a multinational enterprise software company offering products such as accounting, payroll, people, or HR solutions. They've got about eleven thousand employees, right across the globe from a location perspective. And before Sage implemented, managing data backups was becoming a growing challenge.

Each week, the team would run a data export using the data export functionality native to Salesforce, but the files were getting larger and larger, pulling in around twenty eight thousand records for current and past employees.

And, naturally, then this raised some concerns. So the when the team grew increasingly nervous about these growing files, both in terms of where this data was stored and what could happen in the event of data loss.

They also realized that restoring from these backups would be a manual and time consuming process. When Salesforce then announced that they were discontinuing support for those data recovery services, it became clearer that they needed a more reliable backup solution, and they needed that fast.

So as Chris from Sage put it, security was the driving factor, and they needed to ensure their data was protected and could be restored quickly if needed.

So by adopting Giset, Sage gained peace of mind knowing that their data was securely backed up, and they now receive daily email notifications confirming successful backup runs or if any failures were encountered.

Thankfully, they haven't faced any data loss incidents, but Chris is confident that if they ever do, gets its backup will allow for quick and complete restoration.

And then you compare it to insurance. You hope you never need it, but it's reassuring to notice that.

And in addition to backup, Geosets metadata deployment and monitoring tools have made life easier for Sage's configuration team. No more manual processes or change sets for their bigger projects.

Plus, the monitoring alerts provide visibility, and Chris's notes say that about one in ten times, they catch an unexpected change in their deployments.

And Chris summed it up perfectly with the fact that GearSat combines deployments and backup is a definite bonus, and having these tools in one place just makes life so much easier for us.

So with that, as we've still got a couple of minutes left, I'm gonna give you a very, very, very quick view into GSM because then we'll have a couple of minutes also of q and a. And let and we'll see exactly what Sage along with hundreds of other teams are using to safeguard their backups on a daily basis.

So here you'll see we're in GESAT now. GESAT will give me one single pane of glass to view all of my environments, whether they're daily backups or ESSA also provides customers with hourly backup jobs as well.

And within each one of these tiles that represents an org, this will back up not just data, and I'll I'll have a visual graph of this of how it's evolving over time, but metadata too.

And as we mentioned, metadata is one of those foundational building blocks of our org. So we're also able to go back to any point in time to see on a per snapshot basis all of the new, the change, and the deleted items here on the metadata.

And as we as we discussed, metadata is commonly the cause of a data loss incident. So this snapshot here from August the twenty sixth can be particularly interesting.

With Gizet, I can simply roll this back. And, of course, we're looking at metadata firstly here. So this enables me to restore maybe any custom fields or flows and, of course, change back any layouts that may have been impacted by that field of flow deletion.

Following that restoration process, of course, I can restore any data as well. And, yes, it has a powerful search capability to enable me to search over any date range for any specific term as well.

So it might be that I've missed an account. I simply search for any field value. PSF will show when this was either created, any changes, ultimately, when this was deleted, and I can hop straight into my backup to see exactly what had occurred.

From here then, I can get very granular. Do I wish to restore everything or simply cherry pick?

But along with this account, of course, it might have any child objects or relationships too.

So Gearset will understand that accounts have contacts. They might have cases. They might have files and attachments, for example. So restore these in exactly the same way that they were for deletion.

Crucially as well, when restoring data back into Salesforce, you may have validation rules, triggers, flows. Any of your automations might fire.

So gears that will look into my Salesforce org and will see what validation rules, triggers, or flows are going to be hit by this data that I'm restoring.

And if any are found from gears that I can simply deactivate them directly from the UI. We'll move forward for now. There we go. Bugger timing. So here's where we could simply deactivate these to give me that confidence that these aren't meant to fire, and then I simply get a preview of what is gonna be restored.

So that was a very quick look at the restore path for deleted data.

Of course, you can look at the corruptions as well. So rolling back specific field values, for example, and they are more granular types of restore. But, additionally, fully supports the rollback on a more on mass basis, whether it's metadata or data back into the existing org or into a separate org for testing first.

So that was probably a ninety second demo of datasets, data backup, and restore tool. Very brief overview there.

But I'd love to spend a little bit more time running it through with anyone here who's interested.

And I know some folks on the call have already got a trial spun up, so that's fantastic.

So if you'd like to have a bit more of a look at Giset's, data backup and resource solution alongside anything else that Giset provide, here's a QR code to book a tailored demo, and we'll reach out to you.

But we've still got a couple of minutes left, so we're gonna open up at that point for any q and a. So if anyone's not already realized, there is a q and a section available. If you hover over Zoom, it might turn up, those sorts of things.

So please post any questions in there, but maybe I'll ask Serena. Have we had any questions so far?

Yes. We do. We do have a question.

So, we currently use another tool for data backup and seeding, but moving to Gearset could be interesting to consolidate vendors.

Do you ever see this, and what would be the process?

Sure. So it sounds like already using Gasset, but using a different tool for background recovery. So firstly, great that you're already using another tool. Fantastic. So you have at least some coverage. Brilliant.

If consolidation is something, we see this all the time. So teams coming across consolidating on gear set, whether that's for technical benefits or for other reasons like procurement routes, single line of support, contacts, etcetera.

That transition process is really simple, helped by GearSat being in the cloud.

And for any for anyone here who that could be interesting, I'd love to speak with you because I I support many teams doing it most days, and we'll run through exactly what that looks like. So, yeah, absolutely. Sounds like a plan.

Are there any others?

That's it for now.

That's it for now. Okay. Well, as, as this is a three part series, and this was two, that would suggest that there is another part. So in two weeks' time, same time, slightly different place because there'll be a different Zoom link. We'll have the third part in our series here, which is around optimizing your Salesforce data management from a storage perspective.

So thanks so much again for everyone who's joined in, whether it's this morning, this afternoon, this evening, or I know there's some people on here, but it's night. So thanks so much for, joining in late in the evening, and look forward to seeing you again very soon.

Thanks so much, everyone.