Metadata encompassing custom objects, configurations, and workflows define the structure and behavior of your Salesforce application. It guides the way your organizations interact with the platform and manage data. It is critical to ensure seamless business operations and maintain the integrity and reliability of your CRM(Customer Relationship Management) process.
Metadata is essential for preserving customizations, configurations, and data relationships. However, accidental deletions, unexpected changes or system malfunctions can disrupt sales and marketing processes, resulting in decreased productivity, financial loss and enhanced operational risks.
A Salesforce metadata backup and restore strategy is essential to safeguard your customizations and ensure efficient marketing and sales operations. Let's explore how to create and implement a practical Salesforce metadata and backup strategy. The article provides actionable guidelines for leveraging Salesforce-native tools and third-party backup solutions to protect your Salesforce metadata.
What is Salesforce Metadata?
Salesforce metadata defines how your customer data is structured, organized, and displayed within Salesforce. While data refers to tangible information such as customer and transaction records, metadata describes how this information is organized, accessed, and utilized. It includes all configurations, settings and customizations that define the functionality and appearance of a Salesforce organization.
Some examples of Salesforce metadata are custom objects, fields, page layouts, workflow rules, roles, profiles, and more.
Types of Salesforce Metadata
Salesforce metadata are classified into different types based on their functionalities. Some main salesforce metadata types are as follows.
Data Metadata
It includes custom objects, fields, and applications that define Salesforce's data structure. It forms the basis for customization, enabling users to meet their business needs.
Programmability Metadata
It includes custom code, such as apex classes and triggers, that extend Salesforce's capabilities through automation and integration.
Presentation Metadata
It includes visual elements like page layouts, lightning components, and visual force pages that determine how users interact with the platform.
Security Metadata
It includes configurations related to user permissions, roles, and sharing rules that ensure validated access to records within the organization.
Other Salesforce metadata types include categories such as email templates, workflows, reports and resources, enhancing functionalities and augmenting capabilities.
Why Backup Salesforce Metadata?
Users can accidentally delete or modify records, while administrators and users with advanced permissions can inadvertently change your configuration settings, such as adding or deleting custom fields, deleting or changing reports and dashboards, modifying custom code, modifying page layouts, and others. The changes are irreversible, and a copy of metadata will enable you to restore prior settings.
Metadata backup in Salesforce is essential for the following reasons.
Facilitate Restorations to Ensure Data Integrity
Data loss can lead to inaccurate reporting, analytics, and insights, posing significant business risks.Restoring the recovered data requires access to associated metadata, without which it won't be easy to correctly link the recovered data to its respective objects and fields. The correlation of data with metadata makes it imperative to have a metadata backup for comprehensive data recovery capabilities.
Protect and Restore Customization
Salesforce offers numerous configuration and customization options to meet an organization's specific business needs. Organizations leverage Salesforce customizations to adapt their sales processes to meet the needs of their evolving business environment. To make customizations, the organization adds and alters metadata, which becomes increasingly complex as the organization grows and evolves.
If you don't have metadata backup, a significant change or error, such as accidental deletion or modification, will require you to rebuild all the metadata manually, causing business disruption. A comprehensive Salesforce metadata backup and restore strategy enables you to quickly restore customizations, preventing disruptions and saving time and costs.
Compliance and Legal Obligations
Your organization may have to comply with data regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, or industry-specific mandates, and data loss can lead to financial penalties and legal liabilities.
Metadata is essential to preserving the relationship between Salesforce data objects, and it will be challenging to restore data without its corresponding metadata in the event of data loss or corruption. Therefore, backing up metadata enables you to preserve data relationships, ensure a quick recovery process in case of data loss, and limit financial implications and legal liabilities.
Data Security
Profiles and Permissions metadata are essential for controlling access to different datasets within your organization. In 2019, a data outage led to a scripting error that accidentally granted higher permissions to several users. Salesforce deleted all affected permissions, leading to account suspension and service disruption. Businesses with metadata backup could restore appropriate permissions quickly, while those without a backup had to rebuild their org's profiles and permissions manually.
Additionally, Salesforce data is pivotal for sustaining day-to-day business operations and ensuring exceptional customer experience. The mismanagement of customer data can breach customer trust, leading to reputational loss.
5 Steps to Backing Up Salesforce Metadata
Assess your Salesforce Metadata Backup Objectives
You must assess the critical metadata components to back up custom objects, workflows, apex classes, security settings, etc. You must also analyze your organization's Salesforce metadata requirements to choose the proper backup and restore strategy. Salesforce metadata backup is intertwined with data backup and recovery, and some relevant factors you must consider are as follows.
- Data Protection Requirements: How often do you need backups?
- Data Retention Policy: How long should data be retained?
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO): What's the acceptable downtime and data loss?
- Data Encryption and Security: How well is your data protected?
- Disaster Recovery Preparedness: How does your organization recover data during outages and other disasters?
- Vendor Reliability and Support: Is the provider dependable and supportive?
- Compliance and Legal Requirements: What are your organization's data regulations and legal compliance requirements?
Create your Backup Strategy
Based on the assessment outcome, create your backup strategy outlining metadata components to backup, the frequency of backups, retention duration, data regulation compliance requirements and more, depending on your organization's requirements.
Finalizing a Backup Method
You can choose Salesforce native tools or third-party data backup tools to backup metadata.
Salesforce Native Backup Tools
Salesforce offers the following options as a method of backing up their metadata.
Change Sets: It enables you to copy metadata from your production org to a sandbox or developer org. The detailed steps for using this method are available in the Change Sets Overview.
Sandbox Refresh: You can refresh a related sandbox to copy organization configuration metadata automatically.
Third-party Data Backup Solutions:
Additionally, you can find third-party data backup solutions on Salesforce AppExchange. Comprehensive solutions enable you to automate backups of your data and metadata, including a mechanism to restore the data quickly.
You must carefully evaluate available solutions depending on your organization's business and technical requirements and whether you need a comprehensive or point metadata backup solution.
Export Metadata
If you use Salesforce native metadata backup tools, you can use tools like Salesforce CLI to export metadata components by creating and running a package.xml manifest file.
The third-party metadata backup solutions offer features to enable you to export the metadata.
Secure the Backup and Document the Process
You must store the exported metadata in a centralized location, such as a public cloud, private cloud, or on-premise system, and secure it with your encryption key. You must maintain proper access controls to ensure data security.
The integrity of the metadata must be periodically validated by restoring it from the backup.
Lastly, you must maintain a detailed record of backed-up metadata, tools used, and other details. By following these steps, you can create a reliable backup for your Salesforce metadata, safeguarding your organization configurations against potential data loss or corruption.
Risk in Using Internal Data Backup
Using an internal data backup solution allows organizations to gain flexibility and control; however, it also has several risks.Some key risks of using your data backup are as follows.
Security Risks
Backups are as vulnerable to cyberattacks as your original data unless you implement proper security measures. You must follow stringent cybersecurity measures to prevent hackers and cyber criminals from exploiting vulnerabilities in your backup systems and files and minimize the chances of data breaches.
Single Point of Failure
Reliance on a single backup device or method can create a single point of failure for your organization. Your proprietary backup appliances can also lead to a single point of failure if they malfunction or run out of capacity.
Limited Scalability
With growing data volumes, scaling on-site backup solutions becomes challenging and expensive. Adding storage capacities and managing multiple devices may be difficult, as it can significantly increase capital and operational expenditures.
Compliance Risks
To handle personal data, including retention periods and storage technology, you must comply with regulations like GDPR, SOX, HIPPA, and others.
When you manage your data backups, ensuring compliance with data protection and privacy laws can be complex and cumbersome. You must factor in compliance requirements and create mitigation strategies while implementing your data backup.
Geographical Risks
When primary and backup data are stored at the same location, your organization will lack recovery options in natural calamities and disasters such as floods, fires, earthquakes, or theft.
You must carefully plan your data backup strategy to ensure that the backup and primary data stored in different locations are not in the same seismic zones.
Additionally, you need qualified resources to manage data backup and storage. If you lack talent, you run the risk of incomplete or corrupted backups, which can impact business continuity.
Conclusions
Salesforce metadata backup and recovery are crucial for safeguarding your organization's critical customer data. By implementing a robust Salesforce metadata backup and recovery strategy, you can protect your organization against data loss, corruption, and security breaches, ensuring smooth marketing, sales and customer service operations. It helps you minimize business disruptions, reputational damage and financial losses.
You can use Salesforce native tools for your metadata backup and recovery. However, the native solution has limitations, as it does not backup both data and metadata. Even the Salesforce Data Recovery service doesn't include metadata and is very costly and lengthy. You can leverage third-party Salesforce data backup solutions that have multiple options, including metadata backups, to meet your organization's needs.
For more information and solutions tailored to Salesforce backup and recovery, visit Flosum, a leading provider of secure DevSecOps, data management, and data protection platforms for Salesforce. Schedule a call to learn more.
