Salesforce is a versatile platform that can help your business improve profitability, better serve customers, and achieve long-term growth goals. The question is, what would happen if you suddenly lost all of your Salesforce data? Could your business survive?
If you’ve got a Salesforce disaster recovery plan in place, you’ll bounce back. If you don’t have one yet, don’t worry — there’s still time to remedy this situation and protect your organization. With that in mind, here’s everything you need to know about building your own Salesforce disaster recovery plan.
Steps to Creating a Salesforce Disaster Recovery Plan
Creating a Salesforce disaster recovery plan involves several critical steps. You’ll need to:
Assess Your Current Salesforce Environment
The first step in creating a Salesforce disaster recovery plan involves thoroughly assessing your current Salesforce environment. Take inventory of all customer data and metadata you gather, as well as integrations with other apps. Consider what an incident like a major data loss would mean for your business.
Your goal is to identify the footprint of your Salesforce platform. You can’t adequately protect your data against a disruptive event without a clear view of what information you are dealing with in the first place.
Make sure you are thorough. Even a seemingly small oversight could severely threaten business continuity and undermine your data protection efforts. This process is most efficient when performed collaboratively. Work with several key stakeholders, including IT supervisors and business leaders, to make sure you’ve identified all data, tools, and app integrations.
Create a Disaster Recovery Team
Next, you need to build a Salesforce disaster recovery team. This group should consist of organizational decision-makers, IT leadership, and managers from different departments. Each member will be able to contribute a unique perspective to your business continuity plan.
Each person should have specific roles and responsibilities to ensure a coordinated response during a disaster. Run through various scenarios with the group, including human error, natural disasters, and cyberattacks. Create a list of priorities to guide your recovery process. What functionality do you need to restore first during an outage?
While each member of the organization will have a unique take on what’s most important, you should strive to come to a consensus whenever possible. Achieving alignment in your data recovery plan will make it easier to execute your priorities should an incident occur.
If you are working in a regulated industry, you have obligations to the governing body to disclose any data loss or issues. In that case, you should consider that body as part of your team and understand the process for reporting data breaches.
Document the Disaster Recovery Plan
Documenting your Salesforce disaster recovery plan provides everyone with a roadmap of your big-picture strategy in the event of a data breach or other incident. Your documented plan should include:
- Backup operations
- Emergency response
- Recovery actions
Backup operations procedures represent one of the most important parts of your Salesforce data backup and recovery plan. This section provides detailed instructions on how to perform data backups and how frequently you’ll replicate your data. It will also outline how users are verified and where you’ll store your backup files.
The emergency response portion of a recovery strategy addresses what to do immediately after a disaster occurs. The minutes and hours following a breach are about containment and threat mitigation.
You want to discover the nature of the incident, limit its reach, and protect whatever data you can. Limiting data loss will help speed up your recovery time, as you won’t have to restore as much information.
Recovery actions represent the clean-up and restoration process. It’s what you do after you’ve contained the threat. This section of your plan should provide step-by-step guidance on downloading your Salesforce backup files. A well-defined recovery process will help you quickly restore your company and its app integrations to a pre-disaster state.
Test Disaster Recovery Plan Before Implementation
Most Salesforce disaster recovery strategies look great on paper. The only way to know if your plan will translate to the real world is to test it in a non-production environment. Don’t wait until you are facing an actual disaster to see if your strategy will survive the incident or leave you exposed.
Conduct drills or simulated incidents to identify weaknesses or gaps in your plan. Testing puts your team in the hot seat without actually risking business continuity. They can use these scenarios to better understand their roles and responsibilities, ensuring they are prepared to execute in a real disaster.
Disaster recovery plan testing isn’t a one-off event. It’s a good idea to periodically run drills to keep your staff up-to-speed on the latest policies and procedures. Then, conduct an after-action briefing to review what went well, what didn’t, and how you intend to fix those deficiencies.
When you have a significant deployment in your Salesforce instance, you should also test your disaster recovery plan. If your data has changed significantly, it is important to understand how that affects your disaster recovery plan and you should update it accordingly.
Key Components of a Disaster Recovery Plan
A Salesforce disaster recovery strategy must be tailored to align with the unique needs of your organization. However, every plan should have a few key components, including:
Types of Data Backups
Data backups are the backbone of your plan. These ensure that critical information is protected and recoverable. There are different types of backups to use, and they all offer distinct advantages. Three of the most common include:
- Full Backups: Involve copying all your data, creating a snapshot at a specific point in time
- Incremental Backups: Only capture the changes made since the last replication
- Differential Backups: Back up all changes made since the last full backup, striking a balance between full and incremental backups
You’ll also need to choose your replication frequency. This variable defines the amount of time that will pass between each backup. For instance, if you back up your data every 24 hours, you could lose up to a day’s worth of information during a disaster. Choose a frequency that leaves you with as little data loss as you can accept without overtaxing your storage capabilities.
Learn more about Salesforce disaster recovery and backup solutions in our guide. You can use this resource to make an informed decision regarding what type of backup strategy makes the most sense for your business.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
The recovery point objective is the maximum amount of data loss measured in time. It defines how frequently you need to back up your data. Your RPO could be 12 hours, 24 hours, or a set number of days.
The recovery time objective is the maximum acceptable downtime after a disaster occurs. It indicates how quickly you need to get back up and running after an incident. For example, your RPO might be four hours, meaning you’ll be able to resume normal operations four hours after a breach or disaster.
Choosing the optimal RTO and RPO thresholds will help you minimize downtime and bounce back after an incident. Achieving lower recovery times and tighter recovery points requires a more robust strategy. Keep that in mind when implementing your plan and setting RTO and RPO limits.
While RTO is important, RTO varies hugely based on the scale and impact of a data loss. It should be one of many factors in deciding on a third-party vendor for Salesforce data protection if you are in the market. An impressive third-party data restoration and recovery service should provide an acceptable RTO and meet all your top needs.
Data Security Considerations
You must ensure data integrity and confidentiality during the recovery process. Your plan should include measures to protect your sensitive information from unauthorized access, tampering, and loss. This involves encryption backups and using secure transfer protocols to relay data from one location to another.
You’ll also need to ensure compliance with regular requirements relevant to your industry. Otherwise, you could incur severe penalties and damage your brand’s reputation during the breach. Keep in mind that compliance requirements can change frequently. You need to update your disaster recovery policy accordingly.
How Can Own Protect Your Data and Help With Salesforce Disaster Recovery?
Creating a comprehensive Salesforce disaster recovery plan can be challenging, especially without the right tools. It’s important that you support your strategy with solutions designed specifically for the Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) platform.
At Own, our tools can help you create and execute your recovery plan while protecting your operations and ensuring you are available when your customers need you.
Explore our Salesforce backup and recovery solutions to learn more.
