As a leader in the financial services industry, the security of your customer data and continuity of your business operations are top priorities. Your Salesforce data — the lifeblood of your organization — requires vigilant protection. In this article, you will learn best practices for implementing bulletproof Salesforce data protection. We will explore key considerations for financial service organizations seeking to future-proof their Salesforce instance against data loss. Now is the time to take control and implement an airtight Salesforce backup and recovery plan. Read on to discover the essential strategies to safeguard your salesforce and guarantee business continuity.
The Critical Importance of Salesforce Data Backup for Financial Services
Business Continuity and Compliance
For financial services organizations, backing up critical Salesforce data is essential to ensuring business continuity in the event of data loss from system failure, data corruption, or cyberattack. Frequent Salesforce data backup also helps financial firms meet compliance requirements by providing a verifiable audit trail.
Protecting Client Data and Relationships
Client data, communications, and account information are housed within Salesforce and are vital to maintaining client relationships and trust. Without a comprehensive Salesforce data backup plan, client data could be permanently lost due to system issues, jeopardizing client relationships and trust.
Safeguarding Deals, Transactions, and Accounts
For many financial services organizations, Salesforce contains details about customers, transactions, account information, and more. Losing this data could undermine current deals and transactions, and damage institutional knowledge. It could require significant manual effort to recover accounts and rebuild data. Securing a Salesforce data backup strategy protects this critical information.
Future-proofing Operations
Financial services organizations rely heavily on Salesforce and house more and more critical data, processes, and operations within the platform over time. As Salesforce becomes increasingly integral to business operations, the potential impacts of data loss escalate. A well-designed Salesforce backup strategy helps ensure that data, and the business itself, remains protected and resilient no matter how much is invested in the platform.
Data and digital relationships are paramount, protecting Salesforce data should be a top priority for risk mitigation and business continuity. Comprehensive Salesforce backup is the foundation for a data protection strategy that safeguards clients, deals, operations, and the future of the firm.
Top Salesforce Data Backup and Recovery Challenges for Financial Firms
Lack of Comprehensive Data Protection Strategy
Many financial companies lack a comprehensive data protection strategy that includes regular Salesforce data backups. Without scheduled backups, data loss can occur from human error, integration issues, or service disruptions. A robust backup strategy is critical to avoid data loss and ensure business continuity.
Meeting Strict Compliance Requirements
Financial institutions must adhere to strict compliance regulations like SEC 17a-4 that mandate data retention and recovery. However, native Salesforce functionality may be insufficient to fully meet compliance needs. This may require a third-party Salesforce data backup solution to achieve compliance.
Managing Data Growth
As financial institutions continue to migrate critical business data into Salesforce, data volumes are growing exponentially. With increasing data storage demands, performing full sandboxes and production org backups becomes more difficult and time-consuming. A Salesforce data backup solution is needed to handle growing data volumes in a scalable, efficient manner.
Recovering Data Quickly
In the event of data loss, financial organizations require rapid recovery of Salesforce data to avoid disruption. However, restoring data from native Salesforce backups can take days or weeks. Companies need a Salesforce data backup solution that enables quick, granular restores of sandboxes and production orgs in minutes to hours, not days.
Financial institutions face significant challenges protecting and recovering their Salesforce data due to lack of comprehensive strategies, strict compliance needs, massive data growth, and requirements for fast recovery. To overcome these challenges, implementation of a third-party Salesforce data backup and recovery solution is necessary. With the right solution in place, organizations can ensure data protection, compliance, and business continuity.
Strategies for Automated Salesforce Backup and Restore
Regularly Scheduled Backups
To safeguard your Salesforce data, implement regularly scheduled, automated backups. Configure daily, weekly, and monthly backups to run automatically based on your needs. Daily or weekly backups provide more granular restore points, while monthly backups are better for long-term archiving. Store backups in a secure location off-site in case of disaster at your primary data center.
Sandbox Seeding
Use sandbox seeding to create development and testing environments from your production backups. This allows administrators and developers to build and test in an isolated sandbox environment without compromising live data. Refresh sandboxes on a schedule to keep the data current.
Compliance Archiving
For regulated industries, archiving Salesforce data is essential for compliance. Automated archiving solutions can capture snapshots of your Salesforce instance and relevant metadata on a schedule you define. Data is then indexed and stored in an unalterable format for auditing and eDiscovery purposes. Archived data must be held for a minimum retention period, often 7-10 years or longer.
To summarize, regularly scheduled and automated backup, sandbox seeding, and compliance archiving are key strategies for protecting your Salesforce data from loss and ensuring business continuity. With a well-designed backup and recovery system in place, you can rest assured your data is safeguarded from disaster.
Key Capabilities to Look for in a Salesforce Backup Solution
Near Real-Time Data Capture
Near real-time data capture ensures that even data modified or deleted between scheduled backups will still be preserved and available for restore. This capability is essential for achieving a low risk of data loss in a fast-paced business environment.
Efficient Long-Term Retention
To meet compliance requirements and have historical data available for a range of purposes, you need a backup solution that can retain backups for months or even years. However, storing huge volumes of Salesforce backup data over long periods of time can become prohibitively expensive. Choose a solution that deduplicates your backup data to minimize storage costs. It should also allow you to define retention policies to automatically purge older backups that are no longer necessary.
Granular Restore Capabilities
The ability to quickly restore lost or corrupted Salesforce data is the reason for implementing a backup solution in the first place. Select a solution that allows you to easily restore data at the object, record, and field level. You should be able to search, filter, and preview the contents of backups to locate the specific items or versions you wish to restore. The restoration process should be simple to execute to minimize downtime. Look for options to sandbox or test restores as well prior to impacting your production environment.
An effective Salesforce backup solution should provide automated, frequent backups, near real-time data capture, efficient long-term retention, and granular restore capabilities. With the right solution in place, you can have confidence your valuable Salesforce data is comprehensively protected and available whenever and however you need it.
Salesforce Backup for Financial Services FAQs
How often should Salesforce data be backed up?
For financial services companies, Salesforce data should be backed up continuously to ensure no data loss in the event of any issues. Full daily backups are recommended as a minimum, with incremental backups every 15-30 minutes for critical data.
What Salesforce data should be backed up?
All Salesforce data should be included in a comprehensive backup strategy, including accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, cases, and custom objects. Metadata, files, and attachments should also be backed up. A complete backup protects your entire Salesforce org and all its valuable data.
Where should Salesforce backup data be stored?
Backup data should be stored in a secure yet accessible location. Many companies use a cloud storage service for backups, as this provides geographic redundancy and fast recovery. However, for financial services companies, backup data may need to be stored on-premises to meet security and compliance requirements. Multiple copies in separate locations are ideal.
How long should Salesforce backup data be retained?
Salesforce backup data should be retained according to your data retention policies. For financial services companies, data may need to be kept for many years to meet regulatory requirements.
How can Salesforce backup data be used?
Backup data can be used to restore your Salesforce org and data in the event of data loss, corruption or deletion. It also provides an archive of historical data that can be accessed as needed to support audits, reporting, and other business needs. Properly managing Salesforce backups gives financial services companies greater control, security and insight into their data.
Conclusion
As you can see, your Salesforce data is your most critical asset, and it must be properly protected to avoid catastrophic data loss and ensure business continuity. It is crucial to implement a comprehensive backup strategy, with a solution like Veeam Backup for Salesforce.
Carefully evaluate solutions to find one that aligns with your RTOs and RPOs and enables quick, granular restores. With the right Salesforce backup in place, you can rest assured your data is safe and your business is prepared to rapidly recover should disaster strike. Protect this invaluable asset by making Salesforce backup a top priority today.
