Salesforce Data Archiving using External Databases: Challenges, Drawbacks, and Solutions

As much as data-driven enterprises would love to store all of their data inside the Salesforce Org, doing so is not always easy. Its rigid storage limit is one of the main reasons behind this, but keeping data that’s no longer needed in the Salesforce Org also causes other issues. These  include performance degradation, improper reports that don’t truly reflect the current state of business, and difficulty in finding useful data amidst heaps of old records. To combat all these issues, most enterprises now adopt a strategic data archiving approach for their legacy Salesforce data.

Nearly all Salesforce data archiving solutions, available on the Salesforce AppExchange, store the redundant data on an external cloud-based storage platform of some form. These range from internal solutions like Heroku and Postgres to other third-party applications and databases like Sharepoint and Google Drive. But even these external systems have certain challenges of their own that can make the archiving process complicated and tedious. Some of those challenges include:

• Setting up different configurations– It is often difficult to set up the storage standards and configurations in different external storage systems. Often admins find themselves ill-equipped to perform these actions and have to hire more experienced personnel for it, an additional expenditure.
• Taking care of complex relations– There are various underlying complexities and inter-systems relations involved in archiving data into external systems. These can become arduous to manage over an extended period of time.
• Setting up policies– While trusting the external storage systems with your old yet important data, it is very important to define certain policies about the data’s storage, accessibility, and management. These again can pose to be a difficult process.
• Scheduling the process– There are different processes to store and access the archived data in the external storage that need to be scheduled by the admins. Keeping track of so many processes can become tough for people that have no or less knowledge in this domain.
• External data management– This is definitely the prime concern for all admins that opt to store their data in external storage systems. Managing data that is stored in third-party applications and integrating it with internal Salesforce surely becomes challenging over time.

Even after all of the above mentioned issues are resolved by using the correct external storage system and closely managing the archived data, there are certain disadvantages of storing data in third-party applications that need to be dealt with. Though the benefits are far greater in number than the disadvantages, they still put a kink in an otherwise fairly beneficial system. Some of the most common drawbacks are mentioned below:

• Can’t see the archived data– The primary drawback of third-party solutions as well as internal Salesforce solutions is the lack of visibility of the data that has been archived. It becomes difficult to access, perform analytics, run diagnostics, and keep track of that data from the internal Salesforce system.
• Data security and roles– Another major downfall of external storage systems is the concern for the security and privacy of the enterprise’s archived data. Data, stored outside the Salesforce system, can still be prone to cyber attacks and other malicious practices due to which security is a major concern.
• Data integrity– Maintaining authenticity and integrity of the archived data when compared to the original data is another drawback. It is very difficult to ensure that all data relations will remain accurate and consistent even when they are stored in other third-party systems.
• Restoring specific data– External storage systems are difficult to access in cases where only a specific data field or record needs to be accessed or retrieved by the user. Finding that specific record is also a cumbersome process.
• Data Accessibility– Keeping a seamless accessibility of the data even after archiving.

An accurate approach to combating the challenges of external storage systems and bypassing all their drawbacks is DataArchiva, a data archiving tool easily available on the Salesforce AppExchange. DataArchiva is an EXTERNAL archiving application that lets Salesforce customers archive their historical data such as old emails, contacts, cases, leads, and much more automatically and then store it in their preferred external storage system without losing out on the data integrity.

With DataArchiva, you can easily view the archived data stored externally in the Salesforce internal system thereby solving the problem of data visibility. Admins can also perform custom search operations on the archived data which comes handy when querying and restoring a specific record. DataArchiva also lets you view the archived and live data for any field side by side, something which is not possible with other tools. You can also set up policies and permissions for viewing the data, which means additional security and data integrity.

Currently, DataArchiva supports several Cloud & On-premise database service platform providers like Amazon, Google, Azure, Heroku including various databases such as Postgres, Redshift, MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL, and more. To know more about DataArchiva External Archiving, please get in touch with us.