As we prepare to go to market with our latest product, Veeam Backup for Salesforce, common questions we hear often are:
- Does Salesforce back up my data?
- Is this really my company’s responsibility?
- What is Salesforce responsible for?
To answer these questions, we created our Shared Responsibility Model, which will help clarify where Salesforce’s responsibility ends and the customer’s responsibility begins.
If you break down the different responsibilities associated with your Salesforce instance, it becomes clear how much the customer controls when it comes to data and configuration, thus becoming responsible for any mistakes made internally.
In the end, it is YOUR data and metadata, and you have full responsibility for protecting it.
Responsibility Model
At a high level, Salesforce’s primary responsibility is to keep its global infrastructure up and running. With so many customers on each instance, between Salesforce API internal and external limits and cloud infrastructure engineering work, there is a lot of work involved to keep the platform running. Salesforce is focused on fulfilling its commitment to you so that your businesses can be as successful as possible through utilizing its tools and resources.
Now let’s talk about your responsibility. Data creation and changes either by manual or automated processes, are your responsibility. Custom applications that you are building for your unique needs, workflows, fields, and validation rules – these are all yours as well. When data and metadata are lost due to scenarios like human error, (user or admin) integration errors, and data corruption, it is your responsibility to make sure this data and metadata can be restored in a timely manner, so there is a limited impact to your organization.
Supporting technology
Now let’s take a look at how the supporting technology is designed to help each group meet those primary responsibilities. Salesforce has built-in data replication and datacenter-to-datacenter geo-redundancy. This means that, if any interruption occurs in a Salesforce data center, you will usually not need to do anything to get back online.
The Salesforce ecosystem provides a lot of tools and resources to save, move and interact with Salesforce data, this is why Veeam strongly believes in three things:
- You need a copy of your data
- It needs to be stored in a different location
- It needs to be separated from the source
Protection and compliance
When it comes to protection, Salesforce thinks about it from an infrastructure perspective,
they need to make sure their data centers are locked down and protected, as well as regulate permissions set by individual organizations. Many companies view data loss in the context of a massive catastrophe that wipes out all of their data at once, but more commonly, data is lost from accidental deletion or being overwritten by an admin or developer.
Compliance and legal requirements are different for every organization, but Salesforce’s role is only that of a data processor. Even though your data resides within Salesforce, your role is still data owner, and you will need to answer to corporate and industry regulations.
I hope this has helped clarify how critical it is to understand what your responsibilities are as the data owner, and how important it is to have a backup plan in place in case of data deletion. Veeam Backup for Salesforce backs up the data as well as the metadata, includes a powerful search in production, and allows you to store data any place you choose.
Additional resources to learn more about Salesforce backup and why it is so important to your organization.
Read the Salesforce Backup for Dummies e-book
