The volume of data within your Salesforce platform grows with your business. This data is invaluable for tracking customer interactions, analyzing sales trends, and driving strategic decisions.
However, poor data management can cost organizations an average of $12.9 million annually, and retaining all of it within Salesforce can lead to significant challenges like excessive data, which can slow down system performance or inflate storage costs.
One solution to this is to archive Salesforce data. Businesses can maintain a lean and agile CRM environment without losing historical records by transferring older, less frequently accessed data to secure storage.
This article explores the key reasons for archiving Salesforce data and highlights its operational, financial, and compliance advantages for modern businesses
What is Salesforce Data Archiving?
Archiving transfers older records, such as closed opportunities, past leads, or archived accounts, into an external or cloud-based storage. This helps businesses manage large volumes of data without overloading the primary Salesforce system. By doing so, businesses can reduce storage costs, enhance system performance, and ensure compliance with data retention policies.
Key Reasons Why You Should Archive Salesforce Data
1. Improve System Performance & Speed
As data volume grows, especially with significant historical records, queries can become inefficient, slowing down the platform. Archiving older or less critical data to big objects or external storage reduces the load on the active Salesforce instance, optimizing real-time queries.
2. Reduce Storage Costs
Salesforce pricing has data storage limits for records and files. Exceeding these limits can result in significant additional costs, especially for businesses with large volumes of historical data.
Therefore, archiving older, non-operational records to cost-effective external storage platforms such as AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage, or Google Cloud Storage can significantly reduce these expenses while ensuring compliance and data accessibility.
Using Salesforce's external objects, you can offload non-critical records to these storage solutions while maintaining the ability to reference and access archived data when needed.
The data archiving process can be automated using a custom ETL pipeline or third-party integration framework, ensuring a smooth transition without disrupting daily Salesforce operations.
3. Maintain Data Compliance & Governance
GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA do not set specific retention periods for data logs. Organizations need to create data retention policies based on the type of data, its purpose, and relevant legal or regulatory requirements.
Archiving securely stores and organizes data to comply with legal and regulatory standards. Immutable storage solutions, like WORM (Write Once, Read Many), prevent archived data from being altered, ensuring its integrity.
Salesforce data archiving includes metadata such as creation and modification dates and user logs. It also provides detailed audit trails to track data access and usage.
4. Enable Seamless Scalability
Without an archiving strategy, the exponential growth of records can overwhelm your Salesforce instance, hindering scalability. A bloated system makes expanding operations and onboarding new users difficult. Archiving helps create a scalable Salesforce environment that grows with your business. This strategy ensures that new data and processes integrate seamlessly without compromising system performance or user experience.
5. Enhance Data Accuracy & Relevance
Archiving lets you declutter your Salesforce database by moving obsolete data to a separate storage. It ensures the remaining data is relevant and actionable, improving decision-making, reporting accuracy, and predictive analytics. A cluttered Salesforce environment with outdated or irrelevant records can hinder data quality, making accessing accurate insights harder for users.
6. Facilitate Easier Data Management
Salesforce data archiving simplifies data management by reducing the number of active records in the instance. With fewer records to manage, admins can perform tasks like backups, updates, and user permission management more efficiently, saving time and resources while ensuring a smoother user experience.
When integrating third-party archiving tools, using Salesforce Bulk API allows a seamless migration and retrieval of archived data while adhering to role-based access controls.
Archive policies should be aligned with the organization's data retention lifecycle management, ensuring that data is classified appropriately before archiving and that retention timelines are automated.
7. Support Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery
Any business can experience data loss due to system failures, cyberattacks, or human errors. Fortunately, Salesforce data archiving provides an extra layer of protection by storing data in secure, redundant locations, ensuring availability during an unexpected incident. This supports business continuity and disaster recovery efforts.
Archiving solutions should allow granular data restoration, enabling the retrieval of specific records or datasets rather than requiring full system restores. This minimizes downtime and accelerates recovery processes. Archiving systems integrated with automated backup schedules (e.g., daily, weekly, and monthly snapshots) ensure that archived records are consistently captured and recoverable.
How do you archive Salesforce data?
It is important to understand the steps and tools you need to archive your Salesforce data. In this section, we will guide you through the steps.
Step 1: Define Your Archiving Requirements
First, determine what data should be archived. Identify the specific Salesforce objects and fields no longer needed for daily operations but important for historical or compliance purposes, such as closed opportunities or custom objects.
Set rules for archiving, such as archiving records older than a certain age, and ensure your strategy complies with regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, or CCPA.
Step 2: Choose the Right Archiving Method
Select an archiving method based on your organization's needs. You can use native Salesforce tools for structured data, external databases for cost-effective storage, or third-party apps for enhanced functionality.
Ensure the method supports scalability, compliance, and seamless integration with your existing workflows.
Step 3: Extract Data for Archiving
Use tools like Salesforce's Data Loader to efficiently extract the data based on your defined criteria.
Step 4: Store Archived Data Securely
Ensure the security of your archived data through encryption during transfer and storage and by using role-based access controls.
Choose storage formats that facilitate future retrieval, such as relational databases for structured data or CSV/JSON for lightweight storage.
Step 5: Implement Retention Policies
Set clear retention policies based on the type of data. Automate data deletion or anonymization after the retention period expires to keep your archive manageable, reduce storage costs, and comply with legal requirements.
Step 6: Monitor & Audit Your Archiving Process
Monitor your archiving strategy regularly by maintaining detailed logs and conducting audits. This ensures ongoing compliance and identifies areas for optimization. You can also keep your archiving process efficient and aligned with business and regulatory changes.
Best Practices for Archiving Salesforce Data
Here are the best practices to consider when developing an effective data-archiving strategy:
1. Organize & Identify Data for Archiving
Before archiving, ensure that your data is well-organized. Classify records to facilitate easy retrieval later. Identify stagnant or infrequently accessed data as primary candidates for archiving, consulting with relevant departments to understand what data is critical for ongoing operations.
2. Ensure Data Accessibility
Archived data should remain accessible whenever needed. Establish protocols for how frequently archived data will be accessed and ensure users can retrieve it without complications. This accessibility is vital for compliance and operational efficiency.
3. Automate Data Archiving
Implement automated archiving policies to streamline the movement of inactive records to secondary storage. This reduces manual effort, minimizes the risk of human error, and improves system performance by retaining only relevant data in the primary environment. Automation enables regular archiving based on predefined schedules (daily, weekly, etc.). You can achieve this using Salesforce's native options or third-party solutions like Flosum.
5. Maintain Data Relationships & Security
Consider the relationships between records when archiving to avoid complicating future data retrieval. Ensure that parent-child relationships are preserved during the archiving process.
Additionally, prioritize security by encrypting archived data both in transit and at rest to protect sensitive information from unauthorized access.
How Flosum Helps You Archive Your Data
Flosum provides comprehensive data archiving and backup solutions for Salesforce data. It helps organizations to manage their information while meeting compliance requirements securely.
Here are the key aspects of how Flosum helps with data archiving:
- Automated and Scheduled Backups: Users can set up automated backups, ensuring regular data protection without manual intervention. The data backups can be scheduled at specific frequencies, such as daily or weekly.
- Granular Control Over Data Management: Users can apply granular filtering to select specific subsets of data for backup and restoration. This means that organizations can back up only the necessary objects, records, and fields, optimizing storage and reducing unnecessary data processing within Salesforce.
- Flexible Recovery Options: It offers flexible recovery options that allow users to restore data at any point. This includes recovering individual records or entire databases, which can help maintain business continuity following accidental deletions or data corruption.
- Compliance and Security: The platform is designed to help organizations meet various compliance protocols, including GDPR and CCPA. Flosum meets data residency requirements, protecting sensitive information according to regulatory standards.
Flosum Users' Testimonies
"We faced tight budget constraints limiting the expansion of our Salesforce DevOps program. However, we realized massive cost savings by switching to Flosum's Backup & Archive solution over Own Backup's pricier backup option. We expect that the expanded Flosum usage will unlock greater productivity and feature velocity." - Krista Adams, Salesforce Technical Product Manager, Sound Physicians -
"Our team was happy to hear Flosum supports GDPR and that the right to be forgotten is on our near-term roadmap. The Enterprise Architect was happy that Flosum restores will be a rollback restore with the Composite Backup." - Eoghan Scully, Salesforce Technical Architect, Honda Canada -
Conclusion
Archiving Salesforce data is essential for managing data growth, boosting efficiency, reducing costs, and maintaining compliance. By transferring inactive data to secure storage, businesses can optimize their Salesforce environment, improve performance, and ensure they meet regulatory requirements. This process also guarantees seamless access to archived data, supporting informed decision-making and scalability.
Flosum simplifies this process by offering automated backups, flexible recovery options, and precise control over data management. With its compliance-driven features, Flosum helps businesses securely archive their data, reduce costs, and protect sensitive information, ensuring a smooth and efficient data management strategy.
Book a meeting to understand how Flosum can enhance your Salesforce data archiving.
FAQs
What are the Benefits of Archiving Data in Salesforce?
Archiving data in Salesforce offers several key benefits.
- Cost Reduction: It significantly lowers primary storage costs by moving inactive data to off-platform storage, freeing up resources for active data management
- Improved Performance: By reducing the volume of data in the system, archiving enhances overall performance, making it easier for users to access relevant information quickly
- Enhanced Security: Archived data is protected from accidental deletion and cyber threats, ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements
Effective archiving strategies lead to a more efficient and secure Salesforce environment.
What is the Purpose of Archival Data?
The primary purpose of archival data is to retain historical information that is no longer actively used but may be needed for future reference or compliance.
