From the internet of things to artificial intelligence, or major mergers and acquisitions, companies like yours are fighting to dominate their industry and product categories. If you’re not careful, an accidental data loss or corruption could slow down your progress. Worst case scenario...your competitors could get a few steps ahead while you're forced to embark on a data clean up project.
One Own customer, a global healthcare company, houses the critical data of the over three million clinical trial subjects. To improve their customer’s experience on their payment platform, the company was about to embark on a large-scale Quote-to-Cash (QTC) migration. The migration would move their data from a legacy system to Salesforce. After proving to be more complicated than previously anticipated, the project was paused until the company was sure they had the correct data protection strategy in place. Their IT team knew that moving forward without an effective Salesforce backup and restore strategy could be an operational catastrophe, potentially costing their business millions of dollars. A migration project of this magnitude had to be implemented correctly, which is why they partnered with Own.
To accelerate your business, it is crucial to have a solid data protection foundation before you begin any kind of data migration, implementation, or transformation. Let’s explore some scenarios during which these processes can put your company at risk and how to manage that risk.
Migrating to Salesforce Lightning
In their Spring ’19 release notes, Salesforce announced that starting October 2019, Lightning will be turned on for all Orgs.
Salesforce Lightning is the latest version of the Salesforce platform user interface. When you switch to Lightning Experience, the Documents tab that you had in Salesforce Classic will no longer be available. To continue using these important documents in Lightning experience, which include PDFs, email templates, and images, you must upload them again as Salesforce Files. According to Salesforce Help, in order to move files from Classic into Lightning Experience, you must do one of the following.
- Export documents in the Weekly Export, and then upload the documents into Salesforce Files.
- Use a third-party data export tool from the AppExchange to export documents, and then upload the documents into Salesforce files.
- Use an API-based tool to export documents, and then upload the documents into Salesforce files.
To prevent a major stall to business operations during your Salesforce Lightning migration, set up a data protection foundation that includes backup, monitor, and recovery of all of your Salesforce Documents and Salesforce Files.
Integrating Salesforce Cloud Products
Numerous companies already use Salesforce Sales Cloud as part of their IT technology stack. Many are also adding Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, and other Salesforce Cloud products to further enhance their business operations. These Salesforce products are incredibly powerful, but if you are not familiar with how they work, you could potentially update hundreds, thousands, or even millions of records through automated processing. Before implementing Salesforce Cloud products, make sure you are aware of any automations and configurations that could update data without your knowledge. As an added layer of protection, we recommend investing in a Salesforce data protection solution that includes daily backups, advanced compare and data change alerts, and recovery before integrating a new Salesforce Cloud product.
Integrating New-Third Party Applications
To further enhance business operations, many companies integrate third-party applications into their Salesforce platforms. When integrated into your Salesforce platform, marketing automation tools, sales automation tools, third-party data tools, and Configure Price Quote Software (CPQ) can have a major impact on the way your data is managed.
For example, one of our customers recently implemented a new marketing automation tool. This tool allowed them to create forms on their landing pages to capture lead data. Once new leads began registering for their latest webinar, our customer identified leads were being updated in an odd manner. Some leads were changing their names and contact information, overwriting themselves, sometimes multiple times in an hour. After investigating the issue, their admin discovered these forms were using cookies to track every form fill made by a user on the same IP address as the same person. It turns out that for a piece of content like a webinar, people often register their colleagues in addition to themselves, so whenever someone entered their own name and then their colleagues, their own name was overwritten in Salesforce by the marketing automation tool. The solution to this problem was simple - turn off cookie tracking for webinars and similar content pieces.
Before integrating a new third-party application, make sure your technical team understands which workflows or triggers the application could impact. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to know what kinds of automated processes a tool like this will have before implementation. That’s why we recommend you add extra data protection, with a backup, monitoring, and recovery solution, before integrating any new third-party applications. That way you’ll have the power to identify any data changes that occurred after integrating new third-party applications with a backup right before the integration and daily backups following the integration.
Implementing or Maintaining Salesforce Shield Platform Encryption
Salesforce Shield is a trio of security capabilities that you can use to build new levels of trust, transparency, compliance, and governance right into your critical applications. Specifically, Salesforce Shield Platform Encryption relies on a unique tenant secret that you control and a master secret that's maintained by Salesforce. To access your data, Salesforce combines these two to create your unique data encryption key. Salesforce uses that key to encrypt data that your users put into Salesforce, and to decrypt data when your authorized users need it. If these tenant secrets are accidentally lost or destroyed, you may no longer be able to access your data. For this reason, we recommend that you backup your encryption keys as an added precaution.
Merging CRM Systems
When undergoing a company merger or acquisition, combining two separate businesses, you may need to incorporate the data from both companies into one database. To do this successfully it’s best practice to combine multiple CRM systems into one. By merging two CRM systems, you are essentially combining two relational database sets together. Therefore, you may be at risk of creating duplicates or overwriting data. Specifically, when merging metadata, the configurations and process builders that you are including need to be reviewed. If not carefully monitored, these merges can put your business in jeopardy. With an effective data and metadata backup, comparison, and restoration strategy, you can mitigate the risk of merging two CRM systems together.
Distributing Salesforce Instances
If your company were to undergo a divestiture, selling off a portion of its business, you may distribute the Salesforce instances belonging to the sold off subsidiaries into a new Salesforce Org. When distributing Salesforce instances, you must make sure you’re distributing both the data and metadata over to the new instance, while keeping the relationships intact. If this is not done successfully, your business could be at high risk of moving corrupted data, which could include accounts that are missing opportunities, campaigns that are missing members, or opportunities that are missing products. Could you imagine how much business could be lost if this critical data were corrupted? To prevent a major business loss, full backup, compare, and restore capabilities are essential before separating Salesforce instances.
Rapidly Scale Your Company’s Digital Transformation with Own
Own accelerates your progress during a Salesforce data migration or implementation. Business risk is high during these transformative initiatives. We recommend that you have a data, metadata, and attachment backup and recovery solution in place beforehand. With Own, you will have peace of mind knowing that you have partnered with a comprehensive data protection service that minimizes your business risk.
