Salesforce Sandboxes: Why and How to Use Them Effectively

If you ask a Salesforce CRM user “What is a Salesforce sandbox?” you may or may not get a straight answer. However, if you interact with Salesforce Developers or Administrators, they are sure to possess a wealth of knowledge on the topic. In layman's terms, a Salesforce sandbox is a practice environment used for building and testing functionality within a system that is similar to production. These sandboxes provide a safety net for developers, administrators, and architects, enabling them to test certain features within the Salesforce CRM without impacting users in a business’ live production system.
Ocean at a cove with the sunset in the background.

What is a Salesforce Sandbox?

Sandboxes possess a unique utility for nearly all enterprise businesses, containing a representative subset of production data. Many organizations use these low-cost environments to train new employees to use Salesforce, build an application development lifecycle, or even test app integrations before connecting them to a production Salesforce environment. Before getting into too much technical detail, it will be helpful to understand the different types of Salesforce sandboxes.

 

Types of Salesforce Sandboxes

Salesforce offers many different sandboxes, each of which has pros and cons. Each of the sandbox types illustrated in the table below is acquired when customers  purchase Salesforce licenses:

 

Sandbox  Type

Utility 

Contents of  

Sandbox

Cost 

Refresh  

Cycle

Size

Scratch Org 

Lightweight development and testing environment

Metadata only 

Included with  

Salesforce  

licensing

On 

demand

Data: 200MB 

Files: 50MB

Developer 

Development & testing in an isolated environment

Metadata only 

Free

1 day 

Data: 200MB 

Files: 200 MB

Developer  

Pro

Development & testing in an isolated environment with larger data sets

Metadata only 

5% of net spend

1 day 

Data: 1GB 

Files: 1GB

Partial Copy 

Integrations testing and user training environment

Metadata & a  

broken sample of data

20% of net  

spend

5 days 

Data: 1GB 

Files: Same as  Prod Org

Full Copy 

Performance & load testing, staging

All data &  

metadata

30% of net  

spend

29 days 

Sames as Prod  Org

Scratch Org 

Lightweight development and testing environment

Metadata only 

Included with  

Salesforce  

licensing

On 

demand

Data: 200MB 

Files: 50MB

 

How to Provision Salesforce Sandboxes

Salesforce has made provisioning sandboxes relatively easy, even for the most inexperienced Administrator. 

To create a sandbox in Salesforce:

  1. Login to Salesforce
  2. Click the Setup icon in the upper right-hand corner and select “Setup”
  3. Use the “Quick Find” search menu to type “sandboxes” and select “Sandboxes”
  4. This will take you to a page listing your Organization’s sandboxes and give you the  option to clone, delete, refresh, or log in to any of these sandboxes
 

How to create Salesforce Sandbox

Source: https://www.tutorialkart.com/salesforce/how-to-create-salesforce-sandbox/

 

Salesforce Sandbox Management Challenges

While Salesforce has provided a relatively broad range of sandbox types and flexible use-cases, several limitations exist. CapStorm has been serving the Salesforce community since 2011 with expert solutions for Salesforce data management and offers a unique approach to addressing the challenges associated with Salesforce sandboxes:

 

Salesforce Sandbox Limitations 

CapStorm’s Solution

Sandboxes lack a representative subset of test data upon creation.

Build sandbox seeding configurations to rapidly populate sandboxes and scratch Orgs with limitlessly complex data hierarchies from another Production or Sandbox Org.

Generating test data is highly time-consuming and error-prone.

Generate test data in minutes, including specific records and related data.

It is difficult to remember which triggers, validation rules, flows, etc., to disable/enable when seeding a sandbox.

Automated management of Salesforce automation simplifies this process, preventing human error and reducing unnecessary labor.

Some of the test data in the sandbox need to be visible, while other data needs to be anonymized.

Anonymize sensitive data on the fly with field-level masking capabilities for all objects in the restore set.

Difficult to rapidly generate test environments for teams of developers.

Reusable templates can populate many sandboxes with the same subsets of data & metadata and can be fully automated to update sandboxes with the latest production data.

 

Leveraging Salesforce Sandboxes with CapStorm

CapStorm’s customers regularly seeds sandbox environments with targeted subsets of anonymized production data for development and testing purposes. Data can be extracted from production or sandbox environments and migrated into separate production or sandbox environments. As a result, developers finally have private sandboxes, enabling build/test work to be completed on high-quality datasets without interference from competing priorities or projects. Gone are the days of manually loading data into these environments with CSV files! Start a conversation with a CapStorm expert and revolutionize how your enterprise utilizes Salesforce sandboxes.

Drew Niermann

Drew Niermann

Drew excels in presenting deeply technical ideas in a simple way. He supports 50 of CapStorm's top global accounts, helping each company to achieve their desired outcomes while also guiding a team of Enterprise Sales reps to identify and execute on each of their strategic pursuits.

About CapStorm

CapStorm is the most technologically advanced Salesforce data management platform on the market. Billions of records per day flow through CapStorm software, and our solutions are used in every industry from credit cards, telecom providers, insurance agencies, global banks and energy providers.

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