Top Five Salesforce Data Archiving Strategies: What’s Best For You

In today’s era of Big Data, any business’s future existence & growth largely depend on its strategy of collecting, storing, retaining, accessing, and managing the business data. But this massive volume of data comes with plenty of challenges while residing in a Salesforce system such as high storage costs, poor application performance, security & scalability issues, data compliance, and governance. Things become a little more complicated if the business belongs to highly data-driven industries such as healthcare, finance, government, telecom, high-tech, and the education sector. 

Efficient Data Management techniques and analytics play a crucial role in shaping the success story of any progressive global enterprise. Therefore Salesforce enterprises are always on the lookout for effective data management strategies to ease this process.

ALSO READ: Top 4 Salesforce Data Management Best Practices: A Complete Guide for Salesforce Admins

Data Archiving in Salesforce has proved to be one of the most adopted approaches when it comes to managing data growth & optimizing storage usage. According to the recent Salesforce Data Archiving Trends, companies are actively looking for enterprise-level data archivers to keep their historical data. This also enables them to efficiently respond to legal discovery requests & data retention policies, ensure compliance with government policies, improve application performance & employee productivity, and most importantly reduce huge storage costs. For a Salesforce user, there are various data archiving options available & companies can opt for a solution that can fit into their data archiving needs. 

Our Salesforce data management experts provide a brief introduction to the top five Salesforce data archiving strategies present in the market today.

Option 1

Custom External Objects – The external objects are similar to custom objects in Salesforce with the only difference that in external objects, the record data is stored outside the Salesforce Org. Each external object is associated with an external data source definition in the Salesforce organization which specifies how to access the external system. This solution works best for enterprises where data security is not a critical concern. 

Option 2

Heroku-based Solutions – Different open source Cloud-based services can also be implemented in order to archive historical data from the Salesforce system to the Heroku Postgres platform. By making use of the bi-directional synchronization between Salesforce and Heroku Postgres, the Heroku Connect add-on consolidates the data in the Postgres database with the contacts, accounts, and other custom objects in the Salesforce database. However, this is not purely built for archiving purposes. Heroku Connect is known for CRM Multi-Org Consolidation, Business Intelligence, etc.

ALSO READ: Benefits Of Archiving Salesforce Data Using Heroku Cloud

Option 3

Data Extraction – Simple data extraction process can also be utilized for archiving the important Salesforce data. Records and data can be extracted in the form of .csv files directly from the Salesforce system or using an ETL tool. This data is then stored as flat files in an external system which reduces the load on the internal objects. However, this entire process comes with a lot of complexities.

Option 4

Native Archiving using Big Objects – Big Objects are Salesforce’s big data-based storage system designed to store billions of records in a read-only format in the same trusted Salesforce platform. By using these Big Objects, enterprises can store massive volumes of data and records from an existing object onto the Big Object inside the Salesforce platform. They ensure consistent performance and direct data access for a billion records or more. But data from the primary storage can not be moved automatically to the Big Objects storage and requires an enterprise-grade tool to manage the entire process.

ALSO READ: Salesforce Big Objects: A Comprehensive Guide To This Amazing Salesforce Solution

Option 5

Various AppExchange Archiving Solutions – Enterprises can also choose from among some of the most popular Salesforce AppExchange applications to meet their archiving requirements. One such AppExchange application is DataArchiva, the only NATIVE Data Archiving Solution designed for the Salesforce platform that retains the critical data in Salesforce’s Big Data-based storage system called ‘Big Objects’ with seamless integrity and accessibility. Also if an enterprise wants to archive their Salesforce data to any external database using their own platform (Heroku, AWS, Azure), they can implement one of the most popular AppExchange application DataArchiva External Archiving.

Now that you are aware of various types of data archiving strategies available to you, you can make a well-informed decision and choose the best possible solution for your Salesforce system. Here we would again like to highlight DataArchiva as a highly trusted data archiving solution for all types of Salesforce data, metadata, and internal records. This data archiving tool offers several features like auto-scheduling, bulk archiving, and data integration which make this user-friendly application more secure, scalable, accessible, and analytical. Want to know more, let’s connect.

ALSO READ: How DataArchiva is Different from Other Data Archiving Solutions for Salesforce