In light of the Salesforce NA14 outage, it’s time to take a look at the data you store in Salesforce and consider the bigger data security picture.
As a recap, the outage began on Tuesday May 10th, affecting US West coast Salesforce customers. Database failure was deemed the cause of the outage that lasted an entire day. Some functionality, like weekly exports, were turned off.
The outage compromised the integrity of the data users entered during a four hour time frame on Tuesday. Salesforce was forced to restore the NA14 instance to a previous backup. Any data entered into the system during the compromised time frame was lost.
For the customers who fell victim to the outage, they not only lost hours of productivity and foregone revenue, but also lost valuable data that they’ll have to rebuild on their own. The reality of the situation, is that outages can happen to just about anyone, even big players like Salesforce.
It is crucial for customers to have a backup plan. Third party backup tools can make situations like outages far less damaging. Salesforce is a fantastic CRM tool, but it’s not meant to also be a data backup tool.
Without a third-party backup tool, Salesforce data is left vulnerable too:
Missed weekly exports: It’s the admin’s job to remember to go in and manually export a copy of the data each week.
Corrupt third-party apps: Integrating third-party apps can add tons of awesome features to a Salesforce instance, but they can also alter the data in undesirable ways.
Mismapped data: This is a common user error. It’s frustrating for the admin and sales reps when data doesn’t live where it’s supposed too.
Reporting errors: Public reports in Salesforce can sometimes leave too many hands in the pot. Users may alter, delete, or rename reports- maliciously or unknowingly.
When it comes to things that can potentially go wrong with Salesforce data, the list goes on.
But it doesn’t have to.
Using a cloud-to-cloud backup tool can alleviate a lot of the stress and issues around managing a Salesforce instance. These tools run in the background ensuring data is being backed up multiple times a day.
With a tool like Backupify, Salesforce is backed up automatically on a daily basis. The admin doesn’t have to worry about weekly exports. Standard objects, custom objects, attachments, files, metadata, and Chatter messages are all copied to Backupify’s cloud environment. Admins can jump into Backupify to check that backups are running and easily click to restore anything they might need.
Here’s hoping that some of the clients affected by the Salesforce NA14 outage had a tool like Backupify in place.
David Block is VP of SaaS Backup Engineering at Datto. David joined Datto through Backupify, where he was VP of Engineering since 2011. David has deep startup experience: he co-founded and served as the VP of Engineering at two companies (myteam.com, JAZD Markets) and has been a principal player at others (ChoiceStream, Vertigo) in a variety of technical, product-leadership and management roles.
He has over 20 years of industry experience since starting his career as a developer at Lotus Development and receiving his degree in Computer Science from Brown University.
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