Using External Databases for Salesforce Data Archival: A Financial Enterprise’s Roadmap

As more and more of the world’s leading enterprises realize the undoubted importance of data, it is fast emerging as a key element in managing their businesses. The financial industry is also one such ever-advancing business field. As the financial sector is a large part of a nation’s economy, they deal with huge amounts of data which can lead to several challenges, if left unmanaged. Financial industries are also one of the highly regulated industries where secure data retention and management are highly essential. They are also bound by several government and legal directives asking them to retain their historical data for an extended period of time.

Over 80% of the Fortune 500 financial firms use Salesforce CRM to manage their organizational aspects which has helped them in achieving critical business goals with streamlined sales and service process automation. However, managing a massive data volume still remains a mammoth challenge in Salesforce, which becomes more complex when you deal with highly sensitive and classified data. Some of the top challenges that financial service providers using a Salesforce system face today are discussed below:

• Limited Storage and High Additional Storage Costs– Massive datasets to manage and a limited storage usually leads financial firms to opt for the additional Salesforce storage, which comes at an extremely high cost.
• Performance– The CRM performance also takes a hit when data starts accumulating in the Salesforce system, which causes decreased productivity.
• Audit and Compliance– Meeting the several data retention and compliance requirements dictated by the government directives becomes a hassle when highly important but bulky & unorganized data has to be retained for a longer period.
• Security– There is a constant concern for the data’s security and integrity as well due to its immensely personal and sensitive nature.

Keeping all the above complexities in mind, archiving the Salesforce data to some reliable external storage system emerges as an ideal data management strategy. Archiving is essentially moving out old legacy data from the internal system to some external system which ultimately boosts the performance, reduces storage costs, and enhances user experience. But before choosing an ideal Salesforce data archiving approach via external systems for the financial ecosystem, it is important to consider some of the crucial aspects involved. Some of the major aspects that need serious contemplation include:

• Data Retention and Residency– Retaining the data is extremely important for financial enterprises to ensure compliance with government and internal record retention policies as well as to support informed business decision-making. Your archiving application as well as the chosen external storage should ultimately help in storing the data for a long period of time.
• Security and Accessibility– Since data is such a valuable asset, it needs to be safeguarded from all sorts of unauthorized access and malware attempts to avert possible ill-usage. The external storage system with advanced security levels can easily reduce the threat levels. The archiving solution should complement these security features with built-in features that enhance security and reliability.
• Policy Driven– As the financial industry is heavily regulated and needs to adhere to various data regulatory policies like Federal laws, CFR Part 11, HIPAA Standards, and much more, it is recommended to opt for external systems that store volumes of data required for meeting these regulations. Your archiving solution should also support this feature.
• Cost– Various critical aspects about an external system such as its software cost, infrastructure cost, its renewal cost, upgradation cost, support and maintenance cost, and implementation cost have to be analyzed properly. Likewise, the cost for initial data migration cost and the integration cost of the archiving solution should also be considered.
• Performance– The level of performance of an external storage system is often detrimental while choosing the system. Various factors such as scalability, data storage, transformation security, and data integrity must be taken into account. However, an archiving solution should be selected on the basis of data it can handle as well as the time period it takes to archive that data.
• On-demand Support– It is very important that the external system has multiple users who vouch for its performance and prompt customer service, whenever required. Similarly the archiving solution should also be highly credible across various platforms and should offer support through chat, call, or email.

To help financial industry enterprises in creating a robust data archiving strategy for their important Salesforce data, DataArchiva was launched into the market. DataArchiva, an easily available application on the Salesforce AppExchange, is an EXTERNAL data archiving solution that lets the Salesforce enterprise customers archive their historical data by making use of its custom archiving policies. Salesforce admins can easily store this data in their preferred external storage system without losing out on the valuable data integrity. This structured archiving solution itself takes care of all the complex data relationships maintaining both data accessibility and referential integrity.

In addition to this, DataArchiva is also compatible with both types of Salesforce frameworks, namely Lightning and Classic. Its automatic archiving feature is another important aspect that can benefit enterprises, while still ensuring utmost levels of security and integrity. Its inbuilt capabilities enable it to seamlessly integrate with a wide range of external storage systems such as several Cloud and On-premise database service platform providers like Amazon, Google, Azure, Heroku including various databases such as Postgres, Redshift, MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL, and more. To know more about DataArchiva, please get in touch with us.

Also read: DataArchiva: Top Features of the Enterprise-Grade Data Archival Solution for Salesforce

If you are still on the fence about moving your data outside the Salesforce system, then the native data archiving solution called DataArchiva will suit your needs. This popular data archiving tool moves all the historical data from the primary data storage space to the Big Data-based Big Objects storage. Through this, Salesforce admins can drastically reduce the storage costs by up to 85%, improve the CRM performance by two times, and boost user experience while still ensuring data security and integrity. To know more about this solution, set up a demo here.