Even God’s have feet of clay and Salesforce is no exception as the system outage that occurred in May 2016 has proved. On the fateful day of 10th May, Salesforce users experienced almost a four-hour system disruption that caused temporary loss of data, which thank God, came back to the users after quite some time. An experience that taught some critical lessons to users about staying prepared to face such calamities, which can strike any moment. Salesforce users had to come to terms with the reality that SaaS applications no matter how robust it might be are prone to data losses that have prompted them to revisit the data protection policy of Salesforce. They have realized the importance of developing a comprehensive plan for protecting Salesforce data so that they remain unaffected by any disruptions that might result in data loss. Get going in the way detailed below.
Have your own data backup system
Going by the recommendation of Salesforce, users have to take responsibility for backing up data even though the Salesforce platform that runs on the application delivery platform like Flosum.com has data backup arrangements including data recovery. Not having your own data backup plan can prove very costly in terms of money and time that you have to spend to recover lost data. It could take up to 20 business days and $10,000 to retrieve data with the help from data recovery services.
Identify other factors that could affect data integrity
Although Salesforce itself might not be the cause of concern for most of the time, there are many other threats to data integrity that can arise from several factors.
- User error – Since there are several users of Salesforce data the chances of erroneous or accidental deletions as well as data abuse with malicious intentions are always high.
- Third party applications – As you can integrate Salesforce with any other third party applications that might be necessary for enhanced functionalities of the basic service, the threat of data corruption from the apps always remain. Data alteration from third-party apps can happen anytime.
- Updates and data migration – During bulk updates there are chances that incorrect filed update and creation of duplicate records. Either this could make the data ineffective, or in the worst case, data becomes unusable.
The only way to encounter the problems successfully is to have proper data backup in place so that you need not fear losing data while ensuring quick recovery from disaster.
Legal need for preserving data
The demand for data retrieval is growing as during litigations the courts are asking for cloud-based data for use as evidence in proceedings. It is, therefore, the responsibility of organizations to proactively to preserve data so that you can retrieve it whenever necessary. Failure to protect data is an excuse that is not acceptable for legal purposes.
Moreover, the data must comply with the legal, regulatory and corporate requirements of the organization. Losing data could lead to non-compliance that can prove very costly for organizations.
