Top 3 ways to prevent your Salesforce Org hitting the maximum data storage limit

Business enterprises of all sizes & from varied industries often have a definite bottom line. Cost minimization & profit maximization are always the top goals & in order to achieve this, leveraging next-gen tools & technologies always helps in accelerating the growth.

The Salesforce cloud platform has been recognized as the most adopted technology by industry leaders considering the robust capabilities that it brings to any business in order to achieve critical sales, service, & marketing goals, powered by its top-notch CRM. To enable business enterprises to achieve more success in less time, Salesforce has set certain controls to ensure consistent system performance. Keeping relatively less storage in the org to make it light & consistently performing is one such major control.

As we know, Salesforce storage can be categorized into three types including file storage, data storage, and Big Objects. Big Objects is Salesforce’s big data-based storage system. In this blog, we are going to discuss Salesforce data storage & how Salesforce customers can optimize their data growth without hitting the storage limits.

Salesforce data storage consists of the data records stored within Standard and Custom Objects. Data storage includes;

• Marketing Data (Lead & Campaign)
• Sales Data (Account, Contact, Opportunity)
• Service Data (Cases, Article, Knowledgebase)
• Custom Object Data

Salesforce Data Storage Limits

Every Contact Manager, Group, Essentials, Professional, Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited Editions of Salesforce are allocated 10GB for data storage, plus incrementally added user storage. For example, a Professional Edition Org with 10 users receives 10GB of data storage, plus 200 MB, for 10.2 GB of total data storage.

Analyzing Salesforce Data Storage Usage

To understand how your data storage in Salesforce is being consumed, you need to first identify which objects in your org are the top data growth sources and occupy the maximum storage space. To prevent your org from hitting the maximum data storage limits in Salesforce & restrict you from paying significantly high costs for storage upgradation, you need to implement a future-proof data management strategy in Salesforce that can meet efficient storage management, application performance, and compliance needs along with complete control over the CRM data. 

Data growth in Salesforce is inevitable. With your growing business and digitalization, data growth might happen from multiple sources, and having the right strategy will not only help you transform your storage needs but also make your business data-driven. 

How to Increase your Data Storage in Salesforce: Top 3 Tips from the Data Management Experts

There are quite a few options in order to optimize data storage in Salesforce. Some of the industry-adopted strategies are; Deleting the unwanted data from Salesforce after taking a backup, Purchasing additional storage from Salesforce, and Archiving data from Salesforce storage to another secondary storage without losing the accessibility. After working with multiple industry leaders in the past decade who are running their business on the highly volatile Salesforce platform, we learned what most of the future-ready enterprises are embracing in order to achieve data success in a highly data-driven business environment while keeping the data growth & storage in control. 

Option-1: Cleaning up Unwanted Data Manually or Automatically

You can clean unwanted data both manually and automatically in order to increase your Salesforce data storage space.

Manually cleaning unwanted data

• You can always clean up Salesforce data manually. There are certain tools that can help to do this. Salesforce offers a native deletion wizard to delete old accounts, leads, activities, contacts, and even cases. Currently, the complete Mass Delete is limited to around 250 records and is also limited to the above-named objects. This feature is available in every Salesforce edition except for Database.com.
• Apart from this, various ETL (Extract Transform Loading) tools can be used for both data migration as well as for data removal. Salesforce Data Loader is a very popular ETL tool. There are also other ETL tools that can help you manually delete data such as Dataloader.io, Informatica, JitterBit, etc.
• Most of these tools are paid and will always require significant investment and evaluation to ensure they meet the requirements.

Automatically cleaning unwanted data

• It is not necessary that you must always spend a lot of time and money removing your unwanted data. The removal process can also be automated with some AppExchange apps. These apps mass delete data for any standard or custom object and help you optimize Salesforce data storage.

Option-2: Purchasing Additional Storage Space from Salesforce

• If you are from a highly regulated industry (Government, Healthcare, BFSI, etc.) or the nature of your business demands compulsory data retention for a certain period of time, then you can’t afford to delete your Salesforce data. In that case, you can always purchase additional data storage space from Salesforce. However, Salesforce’s additional storage space is highly expensive.
• One more way of upgrading the storage facility is by simply taking benefit of higher per-user data storage limits. This is available to Performance and Unlimited Edition users. Hence, depending on the required number of licenses, the upgradation option can be estimated.

Option-3: Archiving the Old/Compliance Data

• Data archiving is probably the most recommended option, when it comes to managing your Salesforce data storage space. Data archival solutions can seamlessly archive your unwanted data and keep it in secondary storage of your choice. This allows you to free up your primary data storage space and prevent hitting the data storage limit.
• Archiving data comes with a few options as well as a few challenges. The challenges include preserving the data integrity, view & accessibility, ability to restore, and identifying the most suitable storage to keep the archived data securely.
• When it comes to choosing the archived data location, currently enterprises have two options: within Salesforce (BigObjects) and outside of Salesforce (External Databases such as Postgres, Redshift, MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle, etc.) by leveraging any external Cloud or On-premise platform.
• Our AppExchange Applications DataArchiva Native Archiving & External Archiving are the most advanced archiving solutions that help Salesforce customers archive data to BigObjects at a native level & into external databases respectively without losing the data accessibility or integrity. 
• Where DataArchiva is the Only native application for archiving data within Salesforce into the Big Objects, DataArchiva External Archiving takes the archiving experience to the next level where customers can choose their preferred Cloud (AWS, Azure, Heroku, Google Cloud) or On-premise platform to archive data into external databases. Our modern archiving platform not only allows Salesforce customers to perform the archiving activity in a fully automated way but also helps them achieve a 10X+ ROI along with highly optimized storage, application performance & compliance. 

READ MORE: Need for a Data Archival Strategy in Salesforce: Top Three Indicators

To know more about DataArchiva please get in touch.

Recommended: Checkout the product datasheet to learn more about our Salesforce data archiving solution capabilities. Get it here.