Salesforce Data Backup or Archiving – What a financial firm should opt for?

In today’s data-driven business world, no industry irrespective of their size or service is excluded from the government, legal, internal, or competitive demands to retain their historical data for a longer period of time. The financial industry is one of those highly regulated industries where secure data management & retention is highly essential, but while using a Salesforce CRM this comes with a set of challenges considering the limited storage and high additional storage costs. Retaining data for various audit & compliance demands is the topmost priority of financial service providers. There are various storage solution providers who offer a wide array of data management tools designed to meet regulatory needs or internal data retention policies.

While implementing a data storage solution for Salesforce, financial service providers have limited options. However, wading through these solutions is a highly strategic decision to make, considering various aspects such as cost, seamless data accessibility, performance, scalability, and much more. Implementing a mediocre solution can lead to untold obstacles down the road.

So, what are the available options today? Typically financial service providers deal with a large dataset. Considering the massive volume of data in the Salesforce CRM, either a data backup or an archiving solution looks active. Backup and archive are often used conversely but are completely different in meaning as well as purpose. Financial service companies using a Salesforce system often implement a highly scalable data archival solution that can help them retain their sensitive business data for a long period of time with on-demand accessibility, top-notch security, and cost savings in terms of storage. 

However, it is a myth that backup and archival solutions are moreover identical. Though both the methods are being used for safekeeping your financial data, they both are different in many ways depending on business needs. Let’s discuss the difference between a typical data backup and an archiving solution & what is ideal for a financial firm.

Definition

A backup solution normally copies your original data and keeps it inside the same storage (in your case the same Salesforce org), while an archiving solution takes your whole historical data and offers an option to keep it in your preferred secondary storage. Backup data is not the original data, while archived data is the original data.

Purpose

The purpose of backup and archival solutions is quite different. A backup solution is being used for disaster recovery, accidental data loss, and compliance. On the other hand, an archiving solution is being used to reduce data storage costs, run analytics, improve application performance, and to meet compliance and audit requirements.

Retention Period

While data backup solutions are being used for short-term data retention, archival solutions are being used for long-term data retention.

Performance

As a backup solution keeps another copy of the original data inside the same system (Salesforce Org), it won’t serve the purpose of storage space optimization or storage cost reduction. In fact, this will impact the application performance as more data will be populated. On the other hand, an archiving solution keeps the data in a secondary storage which will optimize the primary storage and significantly improve the application performance. 

Cost

As financial service providers deal with a massive volume of data, they need a solution that can help them reduce storage costs. While a backup solution is not a cost reducer, an archiving solution significantly reduces the storage costs.

Considering the data management needs of a financial institution, adopting an archiving plan, and implementing a powerful archiving solution could be decisive. DataArchiva which is a 100% native data archiving solution for Salesforce has been helping top financial companies using a Salesforce application, manage their data in the most efficient & secure way along with a storage cost reduction over 85%. Get in touch with us to know more.

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DataArchiva is an enterprise data management application built for Salesforce that offers complete data management solutions including archive, backup, and seeding.