Overcoming Salesforce Org Growing Pains
Join Graham Russell and Christine Marshall as they discuss tackling org growth challenges with a solid archiving strategy & data retention best practices.
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Thank you for joining us today.
I'm Graham Russell from Own Company.
We're delighted to be a groundbreaking sponsor of Salesforce World Tour of
London.
And on, we help thousands of organizations to protect and activate the
information they
keep in SaaS platforms like Salesforce, ServiceNow and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
We have a suite of Salesforce solutions covering backup and recovery, data arch
iving,
sandboxing and data security and more.
And our customers use those solutions to ensure business continuity,
to help them be compliant with industry regulations, to support on platform
development,
and to manage their data.
I'm delighted to be joined today by Christine from Salesforce Ben.
Thank you so much for having me, Graham.
Why don't we dive straight in to our session today?
And let's talk about growth because growth is good.
And we are seeing significant growth in the usage of Salesforce.
People are creating brand new custom objects, more fields.
They're making more use out of standard Salesforce functionality.
They are constantly adding new records to Salesforce, which is wonderful.
That's what we want to see.
We want to see people using Salesforce.
And I know that, Graham, you've seen quite a lot of growth from your customers
as well.
What kind of growth are you seeing?
Yes, we do.
We support several thousand Salesforce using organizations with daily backups.
And that allows us to look at the size of their organizations within Salesforce
and see how that's changing over time.
In the past 12 months, the average Salesforce using organization has included
57%.
So 57% across their data, their files, their attachments, the metadata,
the nuts and bolts that holds it all together.
And that's because organizations enjoy the outcomes delivered by Salesforce.
So typically they're going all in on the platform and using that to run their
organizations
and to achieve their organizational goals.
So growth is terrific, but it can lead to some challenges.
And that's what we're going to talk about.
We want to give you some guidance on those challenges.
What to watch out for and how to avoid the pains associated with Salesforce
organizational growth.
There's five challenges that we're going to find.
First is performance degradation.
More and more information in Salesforce.
Typically you're going to see some system performance issues.
Your reports are going to take a little bit longer to run.
Your search results are going to be slowed as well.
Now those can cause daily headaches for Salesforce admins,
but they definitely also cause headaches for the Salesforce users across the
organization.
So one of the negative consequences of having more and more data within your
org.
Second, compliance issues.
Now, regardless of your industry, there will be some standards
that you have to meet regarding how you manage data
and how you store that data, what data you retain or do not retain.
And as your Salesforce org grows, it becomes more and more difficult
to be compliant because of just the sheer amount of data
and the variety of data that you're holding.
So that's another consequence of org growth.
Number three, vulnerability.
So you've got a larger data set.
That increases the likelihood of human error of things going wrong
and accidental data deletion or some fat fingering.
And data loss and corruption have significant consequences
for organizations using Salesforce.
Because if a mistake does happen, you've got more and more data to the sift
through to try and work out what's been affected
and it becomes more and more complicated to restore your data
and get everything back into order.
There's another more sinister aspect to this, though, associated with growth.
It's the larger your Salesforce organization,
the more reliant you are on it.
And the greater a target you are for those outside the organization
with wishing us harm, think cyber attacks.
So with organization growth and all those benefits
comes vulnerability as a challenge.
Two to go.
I'm going to go to complexity next.
So when you're adding more information into Salesforce, customer records
and files and attachments and such, like, you're usually adding complexity as
well
because of the relationships between the data that you have in there.
They want a single customer record, simple record.
And it might be associated with multiple sales opportunities over time,
multiple support tickets.
Those relationships mean there's complexity in terms of what you're doing.
And as data volumes grows and shooting data consistency
and preventing errors, it becomes more challenging.
Number five, hard cash.
The other will come a point where you're approaching your Salesforce storage
limits
and the typical solution, buy more storage.
And so over time, those costs escalate because you need more and more.
Remember, 57% the typical growth year on year.
So what's growth is great?
It can bring some difficult consequences, such as we discussed here.
Now, does it matter?
Does it really matter?
Well, I think it does.
Nobody wants to slow system.
Nobody wants to be in breach of compliance standards and face with the fines
there.
Nobody wants to be paying for more unnecessary storage.
Nobody wants the hassles and the pains of trying to restore data after the loss
of corruption.
Here's a couple of high-water exercise for you on that last point.
In a survey conducted in December by Forester,
they found that 32% of Salesforce using organizations were losing more than a
gigabyte of data
at least monthly.
Now, that may be unimportant data, but one of it's not.
One of it's important customer records and details of transactions and services
and such like.
There's also a couple of other studies that talk about the cost of downtime
averaging $2.4 million.
And if you're in a regulated industry, non-compliance, the cost of those
breaches is also extremely costly.
So as a Salesforce customer, you're responsible for making sure this doesn't
happen to you.
Christine, perhaps you can explain the role that the customer has to play here.
Absolutely.
Well, we are so used to Salesforce doing most of the heavy lifting.
It can be really easy to forget that there is an onus on us as the customer to
protect our own data.
And Salesforce operates under a shared responsibility model,
which in simple terms means that Salesforce are responsible for the
infrastructure
of making sure that we have access to Salesforce 24/7.
But as the customer, we are responsible for the security and compliance of our
data.
So look, I know everyone's super busy and it can feel like this is something
that can be forgotten about
until a later date. But you definitely want to think twice before depriorit
ising this.
But Graham, there's some good news, isn't there? Because we've got some steps
to mitigate any issues.
We definitely do. And we want you to be all in a Salesforce and to enjoy the
benefits that comes with that.
But let's avoid some of those pains. We've got six pieces of advice, six
actions to recommend to you.
We're going to take the next few minutes to talk to each of those.
Now, before you go rushing for a pen and paper, we do have some links coming up
at the end
that you can scan with your phones that will give you access to some great
resources.
So sit back and you can take this in. Christine, you're going to talk to the
first recommended action, aren't you?
I am indeed. Thank you for giving me what will most likely be the least popular
of the best practices that we'll recommend.
But it is critical and it's where you need to start.
So the first thing that you should do is to undertake a data and process audit.
That means taking an inventory of your Salesforce data.
What standard objects and fields are you using? What custom objects and fields
have you created?
You should also think about classifying that data and that means reviewing each
object and field to determine its criticality.
So is it essential? Is it business critical that's being used every day or is
it secondary?
And then after that process mapping, so identify any processes, especially
those that generate data in Salesforce.
You want to analyze how your data is flowing through Salesforce through the
different stages in the lifecycle from brand new data to business critical data
to data that's become old and is no longer needed on a regular basis.
Now by mapping your processes, you should be able to pinpoint potential redund
ancies or outdated data creation practices.
Now after everyone obviously creates, has a super, super thorough audit. What
should they do next gram?
The deep joys of all the things. Hey, well, listen, if you're to avoid some of
the growth challenges, you're going to want to develop clear policies on what
data to retain and for how long I buy inference.
I mean, you should also say what data you do not have to retain that you can
remove from your organization's keeping smaller and healthy.
The first step is to understand the regulatory requirements. Do your research.
That allows you to then work out what data you have for the Salesforce that is
subject to those regulations.
And from there you can make some decisions. Now, please don't make those
decisions in isolation.
You'll work with colleagues and stakeholders in the organization to understand
the importance of different types of information, the importance of having
access or being able to have to retain or otherwise.
And then once you've made those decisions document them so your policy is clear
cut. Tip number three, Christine, that's back to you.
So if a tip three we want to talk about archiving, do you have a cohesive Sales
force archiving strategy?
And if not, now is the time to rethink how your organization oversees this
stage of the data lifecycle.
By archiving your dormant data, you can help meet compliance regulations, you
can improve system performance, and you can also reduce storage and overage
costs.
But there are a few things to think about when choosing an archiving tool.
So first up, you want to make sure that you can automate your archiving
capabilities.
You don't want to add to anyone's workload and anything being done manually is
at risk of human error.
And the next thing you want to think about is making sure that the tool that
you choose can offer you really flexible retention policies,
because you want to be able to have different retention policies for different
data or to meet different compliance needs.
You should also think about future accessibility to these archived records,
just because you don't need them today.
You might need to access them in future and your users might need to access
them in future as well.
So if we're thinking about future access, we also need to think about
relationships because a record in isolation is not particularly useful.
So we need a tool that will maintain the parent child connection between
records and also any related record relationships.
And lastly, you need to ensure that wherever you're storing your data, it is
secure.
And not just where you're storing it, but also however you get it from point A
Salesforce to point B, your archiving solution,
that its journey there is also secure.
So we spoke earlier about the vulnerability to data loss or corruption that can
be associated with your sales force or growing.
You should see a data recovery plan as a standard, something that every Sales
force using organization should have in place.
The first steps are, again with colleagues, agreeing your recovery time of
genetics.
That's how long you're prepared to recover from a loss event.
You should also think of your recovery point objective.
That's the maximum length of time permitted that you can restore data from.
Now most of our customers run their backups once a day.
So their RPO is up to 24 hours.
For others, especially in regulated industries, financial services and pharma,
it's much more frequent than that.
So we'll run their backups every four hours, even more frequently than that
when it starts in objects.
And coming to market soon, we've got a thing called continuous data protection
that is going to be absolutely pioneering when it comes to recovery point
objectives.
But you've agreed your RTO, you've agreed your RPO, and then you need to get a
solution in place that allows you to meet those objectives.
So when you weigh up your options, make sure you think of it as some of these
factors.
Consider backup coverage is everything that matters to you, going to be backed
up and protected such that you can restore it.
Think about frequency.
You want to make sure you've got access to the backups regardless of what's
going on with Salesforce.
Imagine the worst case scenario, Salesforce is down.
That's exactly when you want to be able to access your backup.
So if you're going to be back access those backups through Salesforce, that's
something to consider.
You also want to make sure that you're chosen backup and recovery solution
as this functionality is going to alert you to potential data loss as a
corruption.
It's going to make it super easy for you to investigate a loss event.
And more importantly than anything, it's going to help you to swiftly and
precisely restore just the affected data
so you get back to business as usual as quickly as possible.
And then there's also a piece of our communications.
Make sure that colleagues are aware of the backup and recovery plan and the
processes that you've been placed.
Right, Kristin, we've got two more to go.
Absolutely. Well, as Graham said before, don't do any of this in isolation.
It's really important to get your business and your users involved.
So for our next point, it's to educate your team and your stakeholders.
And there's a couple of things that you want to do here.
So you need to train your users on how to identify and flag any data that can
be archived.
Communicate your data retention policies to all of your employees.
But also train users on the process for requesting access to archived data
because you don't want them to not want to archive data in case they can't get
it back.
But even more importantly, I would say is to practice any data loss scenarios.
So investigating data loss, resolving data loss issues.
You don't want to be dealing with it when the worst happens if it should happen
Be sure to practice these scenarios and how you would resolve them before you
have to do it in real life.
I could not agree more with you on that point.
I spoke with a customer the other day and their rehearsal process was in a
sandbox environment,
one member of the team was deleting data and records
without telling the other member of the team who then had to go in and
investigate what was going wrong
and check they could then restore their effective records and data.
If you can't do that whether it's around archiving or backup and recovery,
then I think it's worth investing some time and energy into making sure that
you are able to undertake that kind of practice.
Right, we're almost at time so let's get to this.
I would suggest that data life cycle management should not be a set and forget
emotion.
You're going to want to review your archives and your backups.
It doesn't need to be a huge drain of resource in your time to do so.
You're going to want to continue to explore opportunities for further
improvements in managing and maintaining your org size.
And of course you're going to want to keep up to speed with the regulations and
change your approach accordingly.
I think just as your org grows, as your use of Salesforce grows,
you will want to review your approach frequently anyway because what was right
last year probably isn't right now
and to in three, six, nine or twelve months time.
Christine, I think we've identified some of the challenges associated with org
growth
that we've highlighted, steps that can be taken to mitigate those challenges.
But we're going to sum it all up.
What are the benefits of looking at data archiving and data protection as key
factors in Salesforce management?
Absolutely.
Well, if you need any more incentive to get serious about your data life cycle
management,
then let's take a quick look at what's in it for you and we'll start with
performance.
You can improve your performance and your org speed, making it lightning fast,
pun intended by removing old and obsolete data.
By having a archiving policy, you can make sure that your data is compliant.
It's also important to note that data life cycle management can help you with
your security
and protect against the ever increasing cost of cyber attacks.
And lastly, save money.
By archiving your data, you can save money, save on the cost of storage as your
business grows.
So Graham, where can our watchers go for more information?
Well, the users of our cos I promised earlier on, and we'll run some hyperlinks
to these as well.
These guides are not sales tools.
They will offer you good advice about the steps you should take and the points
to consider.
As you make sure you don't incur any of those issues associated with sales
force or growth.
And of course, you can go to owndata.com and for further information and
resources and guides there as well.
Christine, my thanks to you for joining me today and for all your wonderful
advice.
I really appreciate the guidance you've got for our audience.
Thank you, Graham.
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