General Electric Case Study of Salesforce Data Backup and Restore
Salesforce ensures the availability of the services based on the continuous inflow of data. It offers various data backup and recovery solutions to not break the continuity in case of any data loss or failure. In any instance of a data disaster, it is important to return the operations to the previous state for which instant and foolproof data backup and recovery are essential. Some customers may need to go a step further to opt for an automated data back and restoration solution. In this blog, we will discuss the Salesforce data backup in general and in light of a specific use case of General Electric, which selected the automated data backup and restores options.
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Salesforce data security
To start with, we may review the products and services which Salesforce offers to support data backup and recovery. In case of any system failure that affects the integrity and availability of data, Salesforce can physically restore the database. Data, as well as metadata, can be restored this way to ensure smooth and seamless operations.
Next, let us explore some of the advanced tools and services Salesforce uses to manage the data.
- Salesforce Data Recovery
Salesforce has native options to back up the customer data for 90 days. If you do not have any third-party backup system for Salesforce data, Salesforce can provide you with the CSV files containing data to be restored in case of any data failure. However, this service costs about $10,000, and it may also take up to 8 weeks for the data restoration to be done. If you have your own backup, then it can be done much quicker. With Salesforce CSV, the responsibility is yours to insert data into an organization with a data migration project.
- Data Export
Organizations can now generate a data backup file by covering data and metadata at a scheduled interval. It can be set for a weekly or monthly basis. However, the duration setting may also depend on the Salesforce edition you use. With this export feature, you can download all the data into CSV format and insert it into the organization while running a data migration project. You can get online help for salesforce data backup and data export.
- Data Loader
Data Loader tools is a third-party application that you can use to export up to 5 million records per instance. Then, in case of a data failure, it can be inserted into the organization by running the data migration.
- Organization Sync
Organization Sync is a feature that will let the users work on the top business-critical operations and the data if in case the primary organization experience any maintenance or downtime. This comes as an ideal failover strategy in case of data loss. However, this is not actually an alternative to the backup and restore approach. It can replicate erroneous data updates or cause data deletion in real-time. So, you need to be very careful on trying it out.
Professional and Advisory Services by Salesforce
Salesforce innovators and experts are available with the Salesforce Services itself. You may contact the support executives to engage Professional Services for running your data migration projects. This service will help you insert the data backup or exports into the organization by charging an additional fee.
In the case of general data management and migration cases, these solutions may be sufficient. These can perform data exports, data download, and secured on-premises storage. If needed, these can also run data migration projects to insert data back onto the organization.
Advanced backup and restoration functionality
In order to be compliant with regulations and policies, some companies need higher-level backup and restoration functionality. Say, for example, here are some things they may need.
- To minimize the data recovery time upon any data loss incident. This may be achieved with the automation of data restoration and by removing the need for any data migration.
- Minimizing the targeted period in which the data may be lost by increasing the frequency of the backups. Ideally, this can be done weekly or daily, whereas most modern-day organizations prefer more precise and close recovery points.
- Remove the manual tasks with automating the backup process, storage, and export.
The General Electric Case
The challenge for General Electric was that the IT team which was responsible for data management at Salesforce relied on the weekly export approach. However, they wanted to address the backup and restore of two Salesforce production environments with a more global approach by including frequent updates and repeatable processes to restore the data upon the incident. To achieve this, GE did an extensive analysis and prioritized their requirements. These were.
- Better compliance with GE’s security constraints.
- Automation and customization of daily, weekly, and monthly backups of data.
- Minimizing the cost for backup and recovery and the overall cost of ownership.
- Completeness by covering the entire scope of enterprise data and metadata.
- Optimum performance by supporting LDV (Large Data Volumes) with the ability to optimize the API requests and customize the degree of parallelization.
- The need to support multiple salesforce organizations for ease of use with a user-friendly implementation.
After reviewing many solutions, including the AppExchange tools, native Salesforce services, and custom development opportunities, GE had chosen the Odaseva backup and restore service as the ideal solution for their use case.
Their choice was proven right over time, and five months, after most of the data had been changed, the team reconsidered their initial goal and requested the IT department to roll back the changes. They wanted to take the data to the previous state across the org. With their old system, this may have been needed a very complex and time-consuming export process. With the new solutions they adopted through Odaseva, the It team was able to take a snapshot of the most recent data and was able to roll back the data to the previous state. In just a matter of hours, they succeeded in restoring 100% of the data to the previous state.
Provided the GE case, many such organizations with the same need for data backup and instant restoration in an automated manner, Odaseva offers many customized solutions for the same.