Salesforce Data Governance: Role of Retaining Data with External Archiving

Salesforce organizations today deal with incredible amounts of data regarding their customers, clients, suppliers, employees, and more. Data is steadily becoming the core corporate asset that determines the success of businesses. With digital transformation on the agenda everywhere, companies should properly exploit their data assets and govern them well. This means it is imperative to deploy a data governance framework that fits your organization and your future business objectives.

Data governance is essentially a collection of processes, roles, policies, standards, and metrics that ensure the effective and efficient use of information that enables an organization to achieve its goals. In layman terms, data governance simply defines who can take what action, upon what data, in what situations, and using what methods. A well-crafted data governance strategy is fundamental for an organization that works with Big Data. Data governance also ensures data is trusted, well-documented, and easy to access within the organization, and is also kept secure, compliant, and confidential.

The key focus areas of data governance include availability, usability, consistency, data integrity, and data security. Some of the key goals of data governance include:

• Making consistent, confident business decisions based on trustworthy data
• Meeting regulatory requirements and decreasing the risk of regulatory fines
• Improving data security and minimizing risks
• Maximizing the income generation and profit spawning potential of data
• Implementing various compliance requirements
• Enabling better planning by supervisory staff and minimizing re-work
• Optimizing staff effectiveness
• Establishing process performance baselines to enable improvement efforts

Some of the common regulations that govern most of the Salesforce organizations include Basel I, Basel II, Sarbanes-Oxley Act, HIPAA, GDPR, and cGMP. To achieve compliance with these data privacy regulations, enterprises must adhere to formal management processes to govern the data subject to these regulations. Data governance means better and cleaner data, which ultimately means better analytics, better business decisions, and better business results. Data governance, a prerequisite for numerous tasks, has many clear benefits:

• Data governance provides a consistent and uniform view of data
• Data governance provides quality-assured data and ensures data accuracy, completeness, and consistency
• Lower and optimized costs related to data management and overall revenue growth can be achieved through data governance
• Data governance makes data assets scalable, usable and easier to connect with business outcomes
• With data governance, a 360-degree view of customers is established and an appropriate level of consistency across other business entities is created
• Data governance helps in meeting the demands of government regulations and other compliance guidelines like GDPR, HIPAA, and others
• With proper data governance, enterprises can be assured of improved data management practices and consistent addressing of legal and security concerns

Watch on-demand webinar: Unravel the Importance of Governance with Data Archiving

Data governance planning often focuses on the security, classification, and long-term retention of data, which is usually unstructured. Though these efforts are critical, coping with compliance and governance of data residing in the internal Salesforce system presents several challenges related to ongoing costs and an increased risk due to rigid systems. Archiving the least accessed data in the system lets organizations achieve their data governance goals.

Systematic archiving of the rarely-used Salesforce data into less-costly storage systems can not only consolidate storage costs but also maintain data governance policies and increase the value extracted from the legacy data. A complete data governance strategy with the help of an archiving solution can fulfill regulatory requirements, ensure business continuity and enable access and retrieval of data. Different types of data can be stored for different periods of time.

For this purpose, Salesforce admins can opt for DataArchiva, one of the top archiving solutions on the Salesforce AppExchange. This EXTERNAL data archiving solution lets enterprises archive their historical data making use of its custom archiving policies. The Salesforce system can seamlessly be integrated with any of the external storage systems of their choice and the archived data can be stored there. One good thing about DataArchiva is that it doesn’t affect the integrity of the archived data in any manner and maintains 100% accessibility at all times.

There are several other benefits like reduced data storage costs by nearly 80%+, improved CRM performance, global search feature, and 100% data retention for compliance and audit requirements. Currently, this enterprise-grade archiving solution supports several Cloud and On-premise database service platforms like Amazon, Google, Azure, and Heroku as well as various relational databases such as Postgres, Redshift, MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL, and many more. To know more about this amazing solution, please get in touch with us.