How to Build a Long-Term Data Retention Policy in Salesforce With DataArchiva

Long-term data retention in Salesforce can be challenging. 

If your organization’s goal is to maintain large volumes of old legacy data within Salesforce, the standard data storage space won’t be enough. 

Salesforce assigns designated storage spaces for data & files. All the data getting generated within your Salesforce app will automatically get stored in data storage, while all the files & attachments will get stored in file storage. 

As an organization’s data volume grows over time, it can quickly consume the available storage, making it difficult to retain data for extended periods without incurring high storage costs.

5 Common Data Retention Challenges In Salesforce
That’s Sure To Give You Performance Hiccups,  If Not Addressed Early

1. Complying to Relevant Laws & Regulations:  Ensuring that data is retained for the required duration and then appropriately deleted when no longer needed while adhering to these regulations can be complex.
2. Managing Cost of Retention for Large Data Volumes: Over years of usage, organizations accumulate volumes of data over time. This can lead to challenges in managing storage costs, system performance, and speed of retrievals. 
3. Maintaining Complex Object Relationships: When retaining data, it’s essential to consider ‌dependencies and relationships between objects. Deleting or archiving one piece of data might impact related records, potentially causing data inconsistencies.
4. Avoiding Data Fragmentation: As organizations grow and evolve, data can become fragmented across various Salesforce instances, sandboxes, and external systems making it challenging to maintain integrity, as well as track ‌data’s location and retention status across platforms.
5. Lack of Awareness: Implementing data retention policies requires coordination with users, administrators, and stakeholders, so that all are aware of the policies, understand the implications, and adhere to them to avoid accidental data loss or non-compliance.

Building a long-term data retention policy with DataArchiva Data Archiving application for Salesforce is a straightforward process. 

DataArchiva provides two-way archiving – Native Level BigObjects Archiving & External Cloud Archiving by leveraging your own cloud platform (AWS, Azure, Heroku, GCP & On-prem) to store data into any database of your choice, such as Postgres, Oracle, MSSQL, MySQL, etc. If you want to customize your data archiving process ‌using any of the mentioned applications, based on your retention needs, here’s a step-by-step guide:

Step 1: Identify Data Retention Requirements

Salesforce data retention requirements of your organization can be defined based on four parameters

• Industry Regulations

• Legal Requirements

• Business Policies

• Internal Retention Needs

You need to Identify each type of data that needs to be retained for the long term in Salesforce. This includes standard objects & custom objects which contribute the most to your Salesforce data growth, and are configured using the DataArchiva app prior to archiving. 

Step 2: Define Retention Periods

Set data retention policies according to the types of data your organization retains before you set up the archiving process with DataArchiva. Whether it’s the email threads or the cases that you want to archive from Salesforce, just define the specific timeframes for how long data should be retained, such as 3 years, 5 years, or even indefinitely, depending on the nature of the data (Example: financial audit data, patient records, educational records) and regulatory requirements. 

Step 3: Configure DataArchiva

Configure DataArchiva with your Salesforce to align with your data retention policies. DataArchiva provides flexible archiving and retention settings, allowing you to define custom retention rules, including object-based or field-based retention, record-level retention, and more. You can set up retention policies based on criteria such as record creation date, last modified date, or any other custom criteria to meet your organization’s requirements.

Step 4: Schedule Data Archiving Jobs

Set up scheduled archiving jobs in DataArchiva to automatically archive data that meet your defined retention criteria. Its Auto-schedule feature provides multiple options to run archiving jobs on a specific schedule, such as daily, weekly, or monthly, or even on-demand as per your organization’s needs. You can also run multiple archiving jobs at the same time based on ‌ policies using DataArchiva, without impacting your live org. 

Step 5: Monitor Archiving Activities

Get a complete indexed list of archiving activities performed with DataArchiva, right from your Salesforce app. It includes the ability to view archived records and logs on the archiving activities from a live instance. Furthermore, you can keep an eye on the utility of the storage space in use for Salesforce data archival. This also estimates the limits of the data that can be archived using DataArchiva. 

Step 6: Perform Reviews & Update Retention Plans

Ensure to stay in sync with the latest updates on the data retention policies. This ensures that the archiving process that you have set up with DataArchiva remains aligned with current regulatory requirements and legal obligations. Make necessary adjustments to DataArchiva’s retention settings as needed to ensure continuous compliance with your long-term data retention policy.

By following these steps, you can build a long-term data retention policy with the DataArchiva application for Salesforce and ensure compliance with your organization’s data retention requirements. 

To learn more about the unique features of DataArchiva, this archiving datasheet is just for you.