March 31st is World Backup Day, a day meant to remind us to back up our important data. While backing up personal data is an intuitive task for most of us, backing up business data isn't as intuitive for many organizations. In this post, we will cover why backing up your Salesforce data is crucial to your business.
The Common Misconception
The common misconception is that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications protect their customers’ data automatically. However, backing up business data on the other hand, which this post will cover, isn’t as intuitive for many organizations. More data means more opportunities for things to go wrong.
Risks to Your Data
There are several risks to your data, including cyber risk, human risks, application risk, and operational risk. Each of these risks can lead to a loss of important data that can negatively impact your business.
Cyber Risk
Users make mistakes: Salesforce automatically deletes records 15 days after they’re sent to the recycle bin. Now consider how often people toss things they’re sure they’ll never need again. If they delete the wrong records and don’t realize the mistake for several weeks, that data is gone.
Human Risks
Malicious users tamper with data. When an employee is angry or let go, who knows how they’ll react? If they retaliate by deleting or corrupting Salesforce custom objects, restoring needed data may invoke substantial fees and take weeks.
Application Risk
Corrupted data cannot be resurrected. Salesforce offers some limited protection for accidentally deleted data. But a mishandled or corrupted bulk upload to Salesforce or a misconfigured integration could ruin the database that your organization has been carefully building for years.
Operational Risk
Data imports can go wrong. Automation tools designed to update large numbers of records in a single operation are great — unless something goes wrong. A minor error like incorrect mapping can ultimately result in a large number of records containing the wrong values.
Lack of central visibility and data governance
Without a single access point for ensuring all compliance monitoring and GDPR requirements are managed effectively, your organization can face regulatory fines and penalties. A complete Salesforce backup and restore solution offers in-depth insights into Salesforce data management for compliance purposes.
Business Impact of Lost or Corrupted Data
The business impact of lost or corrupted data is significant. It can result in a sudden loss or downtime of data, a resource-intensive manual backup process, complex and unreliable manual restore processes, regulatory pressure to address data privacy requirements and avoid fines, and the growing threat of ransomware where critical data could be lost as a result of an attack.
Key KPI: Recovery Time and Point Objectives
Recovery time objective (RTO) represents the amount of time your business needs to recover and resume normal operations after a disaster. Recovery point objective (RPO) measures how much data you can afford to lose in terms of time. Understanding these objectives is crucial to protecting your business data.
Protecting Your Business
Protect your business with a comprehensive data protection solution. Do you know if your business can recover quickly enough from a data loss event? Do you have the granularity to continue business continuity? These are difficult questions to answer, especially with the complexity of Salesforce. Talk to a Flosum expert today, and we can help you understand your current state of readiness for a data loss event.
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