Best Strategies to Prevent the Next Salesforce Outage

The context of the Salesforce outage on 20th September 2023 never gets old to keep the backup awareness bold.

The outage lasted for approximately six hours before ‌services were resumed for the CRM platform, yet it wreaked havoc on more than 150,000 customers worldwide and had a substantial impact on business operations.
But it wasn’t at its worst! Back in 2019, Salesforce ‌hit headlines for what has been the worst downtime event, where around 3200 users had temporarily lost access to their application data.

Does this make it less favorite a CRM? Not at all!
Salesforce is the best ally to meet your CRM goals and go 10X for your business. As a responsible customer company, it has always been vocal about ‌ the Shared Responsibility Model for Salesforce application data protection.

This is because data loss in Salesforce can also occur:

If a new admin has messed up the permission settings
If your platform manager doesn’t have a user access catalog
If a user went rouge and ‌performed a simple deletion of your financial logs
Or, if just another case of a failed attempt of data migration in Salesforce.

And, these user-caused-data-loss events are more frequent than you think. So what’s your winning strategy that can protect Salesforce application data from the next outage?
Even though, both the probability & impact of data loss incidents in Salesforce are going to dilute over ‌time, it’s difficult to push the peg further if you do not have an agile BCDR planned. Let’s expand & explain.

How BCDR Planning For Salesforce Can Reduce The Risk of Data Loss

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery or BCDR planning is like a fire exit map for a building which gives you the exact information, like which staircase to take to make out to the emergency exit, if there are extinguishers nearby to take control of the situation or where to get the safety guides to prevent further damages.

Similar to your BCDR plans, it gives you a detailed rule book about what your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is and how it can be made effective, that is Recovery Time Objective (RTO), safeguarding your Salesforce customer data as well as restoring operations.

Possible Actions Inclusive to Your Salesforce BCDR Goals

Let’s say, you are a Salesforce platform manager of a retail company and don’t want to engage an entire team to plan the BCDR goals. Again you can’t compromise the safety of the customer database, right? It’s the single source of truth to run marketing campaigns on that data and losing it to a platform outage can be a serious challenge. So, what should be your next step?

Therefore to enhance the resilience of the Salesforce environment, you need to minimize the impact of potential disasters and ensure the availability and integrity (like metadata validation) of your critical data. Ensure that your disaster recovery plan to protect the Salesforce platform data is always inclusive of these actions:

1) Data Security & Risk Mitigation

Data Validation Rules: Set up data validation rules within Salesforce to prevent data entry errors or inconsistencies.

Regular Data Audits: Conduct regular audits of your Salesforce data to identify and correct any discrepancies or anomalies.

Awareness & Best Practices: Ensure that the sales rep or service agents follow good data practices to ensure the accuracy, completeness, and reliability of the platform, mitigating risks of human errors, right from the roots.

2) Create a Backup Plan for the Active Salesforce Org

Regular Data Backups: Implement automated daily or frequent backups of your Salesforce data to a secure, offsite location.

Incremental Backups: Utilize incremental backup strategies to capture only the changes made since the last backup, reducing storage and time requirements.

Consider Independent Backups: Maintain backup copies of platform data independent of Salesforce, and ensure redundancy and availability for recovery. Check out these backup storage options for Salesforce.

3)Backup Validation for Reliable Recovery

Before relying on backups for recovery, validate the backups outside the Salesforce production org to ensure they are not corrupted or incomplete. To simulate the recovery scenarios you can seed the live org data to a Salesforce Sandbox or consider multi-org seeding to identify gaps in backup processes for adjustments to be made proactively to fit the RPO/RTO goals.

4)Backup Restoration for Salesforce Data Recovery

In incidents of data loss or corruption prioritize the restoration of critical data with selective recovery options systems gear back, restore the business operations, and protect your Salesforce from downtime. It’s important to identify key data sets and systems that are essential for business continuity and ensure they are restored first in the event of a disaster.

5)Check Options for Point-in-Time Recovery in Salesforce

Utilize point-in-time recovery options available in Salesforce to restore data to a specific point in time before the data loss occurred. This allows you to roll back to a known good state, minimizing the impact of the loss.

Considering Backup Automation For Salesforce: How It Can Help

For less manual work if you are looking for the best protection for your Salesforce platform data, automation serves the best. It makes the process more consistent, reduces human errors, cuts down technical dependencies, and can help users to be more responsible toward data safety. The easiest way to call your BCDR plan a success is to buy licenses of backup applications from AppExchange and install them to your Salesforce.

Considering Backup Applications in Salesforce? Avoid Compliance Clashes
Forget ROI, you cannot jeopardize your customer trust especially if you are ‌a global service agency. It’s not hard to understand that data protection rules do vary each time you take a 20-degree jump on ‌ longitude and that it’s mostly steep for ‌countries rounding the Greenwich meridian, yet should not be a concern if agility is your solution’s strong suit. As long as the backup applications are safely localized org-wide for different requirements, duplicated org data to external storage systems, won’t invite any trouble. Exactly the reason why your backup and recovery application should have in-app migration facilities all along.

Backup Integrations In Salesforce Are Easier Than You Think

Considering that your current Salesforce org contains a few TBs of data that require full backup, on top of that, based on the regular accumulation of the data you also need incremental backup facilities. Then you are surely looking for a backup solution that provides you the flexibility with optimum load capacity to effectively replicate your Salesforce data and transfer it to the destined backup storage. Check out DataArchiva Backup & Recovery for easy Salesforce integrations, recovery options, metadata validation and its all-new O2O seeding features for org-to-org data transfers.

For a detailed download of the product features check get the datasheet to know everything about DataArchiva’s backup & recovery solution for Salesforce.