The Worst Data Archiving Mistakes You Can Make in Salesforce

If you’re an organization that uses Salesforce applications, like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Pardot, Community Cloud, Chatter, etc, for managing your business, it’s more than possible that you have realized that data management in Salesforce is complex, considering the limited data storage. This is usually because, over the years, your Org has accumulated tons of data, most of which isn’t even used anymore. This data also makes your enterprise exceed its data storage limits in Salesforce.

By now you would be well aware of the introduction of ‘data archiving’ techniques as a means to overcome the Salesforce data storage limitations. An effective & modern data archival strategy is extremely important for the smooth running of the Salesforce system. Whether it’s slower app performance, degraded user experience, or retaining data to meet compliance needs or internal policies, archiving is capable of resolving all the concerns.

Some Common Mistakes While Archiving Data 

Enterprises must understand that data archiving or migrating data from the Salesforce system is an extremely critical activity as it involves the handling of sensitive business information. Because of this, the data archiving job needs to be carefully planned and thought out. A poorly designed data archival strategy or negligence on the people’s part can result in several complications, even leading to the data being lost.

Let’s discuss some of the most common mistakes Salesforce admins make while archiving their business data in Salesforce.

No Long-term Data Goal 

A grave mistake you can make, even before actually archiving the data, is having no fixed data goal for your enterprise in mind. Since archiving usually fulfills its main purpose of long-term data retention, it’s important that business leaders look beyond storage management in their long-term data goals. Before creating a strategy for archiving the data in Salesforce, they must have a clear understanding of which data is useful & for whom, which data needs to be retained/archived & for how long, how will that data be used for other business purposes, & what will happen to that data after the completion of that retention period.

In addition to that, having a clear picture of the data growth predictions for the future, based on the data storage usage trends, is also critical. Based on all this information, they must finally work out the most appropriate & efficient way of archiving the legacy data from their system. So in short, when leaders do not have a proper data goal in mind or don’t understand the entire Salesforce data life cycle, it usually spells trouble for the enterprise.

Absence of a Future-ready Data Archival Framework

Even when admins are clear on their enterprise’s data goals & predictions for future data growth, the entire Salesforce data archiving process can still be doomed if they don’t have a robust, future-ready data archiving framework in mind. Not aligning the meticulously-calibrated data management lifecycle with the archival substructure can have serious implications for the enterprise.

Before archiving, admins should have decided where the archival data will be stored or if there is a need to integrate Salesforce with an external system. They must also decide beforehand what processes need to be manual & what have to be automated. While taking these decisions, not paying attention to the data security as well as the scalability capabilities of the chosen archival system will again make for a poorly-designed data archival framework.

Lack of Attention to Data Ownership

There is no certainty that after your Salesforce admin created a comprehensive framework for carrying out the data archiving job & zeroed in on a storage system to move the archived data, the archiving process will give desired results. This can be because the admin failed to ensure that the entire data archival model allowed users to have 100% ownership of their archived data. If you’re not able to easily view & access the archived data, aren’t able to restore the data whenever needed, or can’t search for a particular record, then your archival model is not going to provide any real benefit to your enterprise.

Failing to Predict the ROI

Data archiving is not just performed to retain the data in Salesforce for a long time, reduce the data storage costs, or even for data storage optimization. In fact, archiving must be thought of as means to boost the ROI an enterprise currently gets from its data; neglecting which defeats the real reason behind data archiving. A common mistake business leaders make after archiving is failing to determine how the archived data will be leveraged for the purpose of running analytics & making better business decisions, which affects the ROI of their company.

The ROI will further be negatively affected if the data archiving strategy has a lot of manual processes involved because it impacts the admin’s productivity. This ROI will be degraded further if the total cost of ownership (TCO), system maintenance costs or other costs involved in data archiving are high. Therefore, not curbing the rising costs of archiving the data in Salesforce is another common mistake made by admins.

Substituting Data Archives with Backups

Most businesses still fail to understand the core premise of data retention strategies: data backup & data archiving have different goals. While archiving fulfills the goal of long-term data storage, backups only hold the data for a short period. Relying on data backups as a substitute for data archiving again proves to be detrimental because even though backups cost slightly less than archives, finding & restoring specific data from them is a tedious & expensive process. Furthermore, data stored in backups is prone to change, which cancels out the entire purpose of safekeeping of data.

So there you have it! These are some of the most common mistakes Salesforce admins make before & while implementing a data archiving strategy for their Org. Now, it’s a quirk of human nature: the mistakes of others amuse us. But that amusement can soon turn to shock when you recognize your own mistakes in them. Now it’s up to you to assess whether you’re making the same mistakes we mentioned above.

Resolve the Common Mistakes with DataArchiva

If you want to avoid making these mistakes & need any assistance in managing the data archiving job in Salesforce, our enterprise-grade data archiving solution, DataArchiva is at your disposal. This one of its kind application will enable you to automatically archive your legacy data into different external databases (Postgres, Redshift, MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle) by leveraging various platforms (AWS, Azure, Heroku, GCP, On-premise); without even using any additional integration tool. You can also use the app to generate data analysis reports & meet your compliance requirements.

Want to know more about this solution or how it can prevent you from making one of these data archiving mistakes? Please get in touch with our experts so they can guide you through.