Backup and Recovery for Salesforce

Demand for enterprise resilience solutions is up during Covid-19.

I had the opportunity to meet with Ori Yankelev, EVP of Sales for OwnBackup during IT Press Tour #35.

According to Ori, several things are taking place causing enterprises to focus on resilience:

1. These include the Amazon effect which has increased consumer expectations and demand to be able to get what they want to be delivered the next day or even the same day.

2. The cloud is getting increasingly more complicated. As cloud apps and platforms are adopted, data volume and velocity are growing exponentially. Errors and corruption can have cascading implications.

3. Low-code and no-code development promoted by cloud platforms to support customization and integration. Loose processes, coupled with immature platforms and inexperienced developers introduce more errors, security vulnerabilities, and technical debt when the code needs to be cleaned up or rewritten.

4. SaaS vendors provide a shared responsibility model. The vendor is responsible for platform security, availability, and uptime. The user is responsible for security in the cloud including two-factor authentication and user-inflicted error.

5. Technology needs to be trusted and needs to regain users’ trust.

6. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the next tech multiplier; however, it can accelerate errors and vulnerabilities just as it can accelerate development and efficiency.

7. Malicious attacks are targeting backup and have accelerated since Covid-19.

8. Salesforce is retiring their data recovery service because they are unable to meet their standards for customer experience (CX) due to the amount of time (6 to 8 weeks) and the reliability of the process. They cannot guarantee 100% data recovery.

While the cloud is not a completely secure fortress, we rely on the cloud more than ever with more apps, more data, more automation, and more workflows to provide a personalized CX. The business impact of losing critical data is that sales, orders, and deliveries all grind to a halt. Customer service is unable to serve customers and CX deteriorates. There is wasted energy spent on fire drills that can last for days or weeks and drive down productivity. Fewer than 50% of Salesforce customers have any backup of their Salesforce data.

OwnBackup just began offering automated sandbox seeding processes to create datasets for faster development cycles, to reduce errors in production, and to enable businesses to realize business benefits more quickly. Datasets can be seeded to dev, dev pro, or partial sandboxes from production organizations or other sandboxes. Users can create, edit and clone reusable templates to isolate perfect data sets to seed any sandbox with an identical data structure. The sandbox automatically maintains parent/child relationships of data seeds without difficult and error-prone workarounds.

Users are able to build resilience with rapid recovery of comprehensive data including relationships, attachments, and chatter. There are field, object level, and full organization recovery options with granular or bulk data restoration. Data can be recovered from multiple points in time and manage conflicts during recovery.

OwnData provides advanced key management and brings your own key management service. Customer-generated keys enable customers to submit, rotate, and revoke keys; encrypt data dedicated to volumes or buckets; and, have on-demand key rotation based on users’ schedules.

They also offer governance plus industrial-strength backup and recovery. Comprehensive backup and recovery include 25-year retention of daily backups, 99-year retention of monthly backups, unlimited storage capacity, and unlimited business units. Write once, restore to many with no rewritable, no erasable ensures records cannot be modified or deleted. Retention policies can be customized and automated. Everything is time-stamped, synched to an external time server eliminating the ability to modify the system time. Legal hold preserves records indefinitely irrespective of the defined retention policy.

All of this simplifies regulatory compliance to safeguard sensitive data and comply with complex regulations.