Salesforce is the world’s leading CRM platform and has revolutionized the way organizations manage their business, streamline sales processes and reporting. That said, Salesforce does have limitations as data inside the force.com platform creates a data silo which does not allow for critical business processes to be integrated with outside data sources. Hosting Salesforce data off-platform can not only unlock a world of new opportunities for new insights but it also allows for a significant improvement in exposing new business value. In this blog article, I’ll explore the potential benefits of hosting Salesforce data off-platform and describe how achieving the art-of-possible for driving business value when Salesforce data is backed up and stored independently.
- Advanced analytics: with off-platform Salesforce data, organizations can employ advanced analytics tools and techniques that may not be directly available when the data is inside Salesforce. This enables them to gain deeper insights into customer behavior, sales trends, and business performance. Ultimately leading to data-driven decision making.
- Custom Reporting and Dashboards: storing Salesforce data off-platfrom allows for the development of customized reporting for dashboards. These can be tailored to specific business needs, providing a more comprehensive view of data that enables executives to monitor KPI’s and performance metrics with greater accuracy.
- Integrations with other systems: off-platform Salesforce data can be more easily integrated with other systems, opening new opportunities for streamlined workflows for marketing automation tools, other ERP systems, or internal custom applications for a single unified view of your business operations.
- Improved security posture: storing Salesforce data independently can lead to an enhanced security posture. Organizations can implement stricter user access controls and encryption protocols to protect their data and reduce threats for ransomware or other unauthorized access to their critical business systems.
- Scalability: off-platform data allows for growing data volumes to be better managed and unlocks the art-of-possible for innovation. This scalability enables organizations to manage larger and more complex data sets to better leverage their Salesforce data in ways that are simply not achievable when data is inside the force.com platform and limited by the data silo it creates.
In summary, recognizing the art-of-possible with off-platform Salesforce data involves understanding the opportunities for innovation that come with hosting your data independently and the business value it drives when the Salesforce data silo is eliminated.
Join us each Thursday for more episodes of Radical Transparency as we show you how to harness Salesforce data for unparalleled growth and innovation. In addition, we would love to hear from you if you are looking for a fast, easy, and highly secure way to protect your Salesforce data & metadata! Contact an SFDC data expert or join us on LinkedIn, Youtube, or Twitter.
Video Transcription
Welcome to Radical Transparency. My name is Ted Pappas, and in this video series, we’ll talk about why making Salesforce data off-platform, that’s both accessible and verifiable, is critical to your business.
Following the Salesforce pillar of equal education, my goal is simple: It’s to make sure that everyone in the Salesforce community is equally educated with the art of possible for Salesforce data off-platform. And in this episode, we’ll talk about the business value you’ll gain your business will gain with off-platform Salesforce data.
The first is advanced analytics. This may be controversial to say, but there is a data silo created between in-platform data and all the Direct Connect analytics engines, having your data off-platform integrated with other data sources, and then replicated to the analytics engines eliminates the myopic view of the data set.
The second business driver is customer reporting, whether it’s Tableau, Power BI, Qlik, or anything else, the exact same data silos exist, extraction from the Force.com platform, integration into other data sources, pushing the data to an advanced analytics engine, and then reverse ETL bring it right back into the source makes the data bigger.
Perhaps the most important one here is your security posture, and how to improve your security posture. So when Salesforce data comes out of the force.com platform for highly regulated environments, and in our business, it’s primarily HLS, FinServ, insurance, PubSec and Fed or any regulated market, the Salesforce Shield rules do not apply to data outside of the platform.
So having a company that can help you apply, whether it’s encryption, obfuscation, user access controls – it doesn’t matter– that can extend the life of the Salesforce Shield rules to data off-platform is critical to driving high levels of business value.
And the last value that’s driven from off-platform Salesforce data is scalability. There are storage limitations in Salesforce. And when you exceed the storage limitation, the only thing to do is to buy more storage.
There are ways to get the data out of the platform to store it behind your firewall, which will give you data bloat relief from having to scale up to more storage. So scalability limitations within platform data is a real problem. Taking the data off-platform for long-term archival use cases as an example is a real answer.
Again, my name is Ted Pappas; I’m the CEO of CapStorm. Thank you for watching.