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:
- Login to Salesforce
- Click the Setup icon in the upper right-hand corner and select “Setup”
- Use the “Quick Find” search menu to type “sandboxes” and select “Sandboxes”
- 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
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.