Data Control and Security: 

With complete control over your Salesforce data infrastructure, you can tailor security measures to fit your unique needs, ensuring every piece of data is shielded from potential threats. 

• Self-Hosted Backup: You own and control the security posture of the data model. This means you also manage where your data resides; keeping it on your infrastructure is critical. 
• Salesforce Data Cloud: Data is shared with third-party providers. This is cause for concern regarding data security and compliance, specifically for highly regulated environments. 

Integration Functionality:

Having the ability to seamlessly integrate your Salesforce data is a game-changer. A self-hosted backup solution allows you the freedom to customize integrations according to your unique business requirements.

• Self-Hosted Backup: This allows you to design and execute custom integrations that align with your company’s unique processes and workflows, utilizing various tools, ETL processes, and data connectors to achieve your desired outcomes.
• Salesforce Data Cloud: Integrations with Data Cloud are standardized and may not accommodate complex or highly customized integration scenarios. This solution is designed for basic data enrichment and low-end use cases. 

Storage Cost and Volume: 

Managing vast amounts of data while maintaining budgetary constraints poses a significant challenge for businesses. With on-prem solutions, businesses can optimize data volumes efficiently, ensuring seamless scalability without compromising on costs.

• Self-Hosted Backup: You manage your infrastructure and storage platforms. Tiering storage environments based on use case criticality helps manage spending and data bloat.
• Salesforce Data Cloud: Data Cloud provides access to external data sources for a fee, which may appear to have predictable costs. However, it may not be the most cost-effective option. This is especially true if you have a large amount of data or require customized integrations, as this can lead to uncontrolled costs.

Where Salesforce Data Cloud has its purpose, organizations with specific integration requirements, highly regulated data security and compliance needs, and the ability to control storage costs, an effective solution is through a self-hosted Salesforce backup. 

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 having a Salesforce backup off-platform, that’s both accessible and verifiable, is critical to your business.

In this video series will follow the Salesforce pillar of equal education. My goal in this series is really simple. It’s to make sure that everyone in the Salesforce ecosystem is equally educated in the art of possible with Salesforce data off-platform. 

And today, we’re going to talk about the differences between Salesforce Data Cloud and a self-hosted backup. My intentions are not to make this controversial; my intentions are not to say anything other than the Salesforce Data Cloud is a fantastic product. But it does have limitations. And it is primarily best suited with low-end use cases. 

So, difference number one, and this is something we talk about all the time, which I believe to be the biggest advantage of a self-hosted backup are security and control – everything around GRC governance risk and compliance. If you put your data into Salesforce Data Cloud, you are still under the handcuffs of the security posture of the platform and who the platform is integrating with. With a self-hosted backup, there are no handcuffs; the security posture is regulated by the your internal controls of your security team. 

So, I believe security and controls are the number one consideration when looking at data cloud versus self-hosted. 

Number two is integration functionality. Data Cloud integrates with a number of third-party providers, but the integrations are standard. And if you’re an enterprise environment, and you have a highly customizable integration path or integration workflows, your data model is large and complex, getting the data out of platform, self-hosted, presumably in a VPC behind your firewall, allows you with much greater flexibility for integrations of data. So, number two is integration flexibility. 

And number three, which I believe to be the second biggest consideration next to GRC is storage costs. We’ve talked about this before. Salesforce storage costs are predictable, the level is set, but what’s not predictable is when you have to level up in storage. And in the Data Cloud Platform, when all data is integrated into the platform, there’s this thing that causes data bloat, the bigger data gets, the faster you have to level up and storage.

With a self-hosted, off-platform backup, you control the storage costs. So whether you’re replicating that to a low-end storage, spinning disk in your environment, whether you’re moving it to a bucket in S3 or AWS or a lower-in-cost provider like Glacier on AWS, you control the storage cost of your backup. 

So, number one GRC data controls and security. Number two, the flexibility for integrations. And number three, the ability to eliminate data bloat and control your storage costs. 

Again, my name is Ted Pappas. I’m the CEO of CapStorm. Thank you for watching Radical Transparency. Please come back here next Thursday for the next episode of Radical Transparency. And thank you very much.