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Episode 3 of Data Unleashed outlines two basic approaches for managing Salesforce backup and recovery: SaaS and Self-Hosted. Generally speaking, SaaS solutions have a slightly more straightforward implementation process but are very limited on how backups can be validated, leveraged, and relied upon for point-in-time recovery. On the other hand, self-hosted solutions require extra effort on the front end when provisioning infrastructure. Still, they are much more reliable when testing the recovery process, validating the completion of the backups, and restoring data accurately & efficiently.
Each solution has its unique characteristics, but several things should always be true when selecting a Salesforce backup & recovery partner:
- Backups should be easily accessible and readily verifiable so that they can prove the completeness of the backup.
- A Salesforce backup should be helpful for more than just a backup.
- A recovery solution should be helpful for more than production recovery scenarios to ensure the process is well understood by relevant stakeholders and simple to test repeatedly.
When fulfilling these three principles, a self-hosted approach to Salesforce backup and recovery provides the most robust and high-fidelity solution. End users can validate the “completeness” of their backups, use the data for reporting and integration purposes, and test the recovery process daily by leveraging the restore solution for sandbox seeding. Did we mention the added security benefits of having your backups behind your firewall? Infosec teams love hearing that their backup vendor will never see or store any data!
Most organizations assume that recovering Salesforce data is fast and easy. But unfortunately, most SaaS solutions are very limited in the depth of data relationships they can retrieve. The tricky part about this is that end users end up with hundreds or even thousands of spreadsheets they must manually stitch together in the event of a production data disaster. This is like disassembling and rebuilding your vehicle each time you drive it to work in the morning! We can all agree that this is not a viable solution, and Salesforce customers deserve better!
Tune in each Tuesday for more episodes of Data Unleashed, and discover all the tips and tricks to help you get more value from your investment in Salesforce. If you are looking for a fast, easy, and highly-secure way to protect your Salesforce data & metadata, we would love to hear from you! Reach out to an SFDC data expert or send us a message on LinkedIn!
Video Transcription
Hi, my name is Drew Niermann, and you are watching Data Unleashed, the Salesforce video blog series dedicated to helping you get more value out of your investment in Salesforce.
So today, we’re gonna start by talking about the different Salesforce backup and recovery solutions that are out on the marketplace today.
You can basically break them down into one of two approaches, there’s the SaaS fork in the road, and then there’s the self-hosted fork in the road. So I’ll start with Saas. Over here would be the type of solution where you are entrusting a vendor to basically set up your Salesforce insurance policy, there’s not really a way to validate and use the data because it lives in the vendor’s cloud.
Oftentimes, you’re limited to how frequently you can backup the data because again, it’s in the vendor’s cloud on their storage and compute, and they can’t allow any one client to consume too much of their compute or storage resources.
Third, something that we hear about quite frequently at Data Unleashed is the idea that when it comes time to restore, because you’re limited to the once-a-day backups, or once-every 12-hour backups, your recovery point objective (RPO) is kind of broad, you can’t go back and fine grain increments to get a subset of data at a very specific point in time.
And lastly, they’re often breaking the data model integrity apart by dumping the data from Salesforce into a bunch of spreadsheets, you have to manually stitch back together, its just kind of a painful process to be completely honest.
On the other side, would be the self-hosted approach, where you actually have control over where the backups are stored how often they’re taking, it could be as often as every three to five minutes again, because it lives on your storage and your compute and behind your firewall.
Most importantly, what this happens to do for you, as far as outcomes are concerned, and it gives you the tightest RTO recovery time objective and tightest RPO that you could possibly get because you’re backing up as frequently as Salesforce will allow you to not as frequently as your SaaS vendor would allow you to do.
One of the other key differentiators here that I’d like you to consider is that when you back up to a self-hosted solution, you can actually store the copy of Salesforce with the backup in a relational database and preserve the referential integrity of your entire data model.
So that when it comes time to restore data back to Salesforce, you got your database snapshots to go back in five to 10-minute intervals. You’ve also got the referential integrity of your data model fully preserved so you don’t have to stitch those records and relationships back together.
Thank you so much for watching. My name is Drew Niermann, this is #DataUnleashed.
