Financial services companies that use Salesforce to store their data in the cloud can sometimes feel a false sense of security that nothing will ever go wrong. They just have to log in, and all of their data will be there.
But things can go haywire much easier—and faster—than you might think. Someone could inadvertently delete something. Or an employee could make changes in production thinking they’re in a sandbox. With integrations running and multiple dashboards, one tiny error can throw a wrench into the entire system.
That’s when having an effective backup and recovery solution in place is the difference between a full-scale disaster and a mere bump in the road, according to Own Company Champion Elliott Spence. Elliott is a Director of the Banking and Lending division of Silverline, a Salesforce Partner offering digital transformation solutions.
He says that financial services companies that use Salesforce need to have an independent backup and recovery product for data security and audit compliance. He’s been using Own (formerly OwnBackup) for years, both at Silverline and in previous jobs, and he encourages his clients to do the same. Read on to find out why.
When things go off the rails, Own is there
Elliott had been running Own in conjunction with Salesforce at a large Regional Bank for three months when Own saved the day in a big way. It was a Friday afternoon at the end of a quarter, and an admin deleted a custom report type in production, thinking they were in a sandbox. A seemingly simple error broke around 500 reports and 40 dashboards. The tickets started flying in.
Elliott, the Senior Product Owner, and his team were sitting around a conference table at their weekly meeting when it happened and watched the situation devolve before their eyes. They quickly identified the problem and tried some in-house fixes to no avail. Spirits plummeted as the reality of an all-hands-on-deck work weekend began to sink in.
That’s when Elliott remembered Own. His account rep had told him to call if such a situation arose, and that’s what he did. Ten minutes later, he had his account rep on the phone and working through the problem. Twenty minutes later, the system was restored and everything was back up online. Everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief as they happily went home for the weekend.
In Elliott’s opinion, backups are easy, but restoring is the tricky part. With financial services companies in particular, operations like loan origination, loan onboarding, and deposit onboarding require multiple sensitive and personal documents that can be difficult to recover. According to Elliott, Own is the only provider that can fully restore those documents.
Recommended Reading: Easily Access and Search Your Past Backups with Recover
Features that make the difference
From the first demo he ever did at a trade fair, Elliott knew Own was the product he needed. The platform was easy to use and implement, and it made total sense to him. Now that he’s a seasoned user, he regularly takes advantage of Own’s features to make his job easier.
1. Effective dashboard and visuals
The Own user interface makes it easy to back up both production environments and sandboxes, as well as to automate and schedule backups. The visuals show how many records have been backed up, both in overall numbers and broken down by record type.
2. Smart Alerts
When something goes wrong, effective damage control starts with being able to identify the problem as soon as possible. That’s why Smart Alerts are one of Elliott’s favorite Own features. These notifications proactively engage him whenever records drop below a certain percentage or threshold. This early warning lets him get ahead of situations that he otherwise may not have known about for hours or longer.
3. Sandbox Seeding
At Silverline, the data architecture strategy is such that every admin has their own developer environment, which then gets promoted to partial and full copies. With so many sandboxes, it can be difficult to keep the production environment bug-free. Sandbox Seeding mitigates that risk by sending quality data sets into any sandbox for safer testing and development.
Checks and balances for audit compliance
Financial services is one of the most heavily regulated industries in the United States, and compliance audit risk is a major concern. That’s why, if companies are running Salesforce, they need to have a reliable way to back up and restore the data in the platform.
From his experience at financial services institutions, Elliott knows that no compliance audit risk team is going to accept a backup and recovery solution from the same company that’s providing the cloud services. In other words, you can’t back up Salesforce with Salesforce.
If you’re doing a restore, Elliott explains, there’s a reason for it, and it’s probably because something has gone wrong at Salesforce. There’s no way of knowing whether the same situation causing the outage is also affecting the backup portion of the platform.
That’s why separation of duties is essential. By combining Own with Salesforce, Elliott has 100% reliability that his data remains secure and recoverable. Those are the checks and balances that government compliance audits are looking for—and that let him sleep at night.
Recommended Reading: The Growing Importance of Backup and Recovery Compliance
Own takes the stress out of backup and recovery
Elliott spends his days talking to banks, credit unions, and mortgage companies, and although backup and recovery is always at the front of his mind, he finds that many of his clients have never even stopped to consider it.
Elliott knows that it’s not about if problems occur, but when—something he’s learned the hard way. Thankfully, having implemented Own, his own brush with disaster was remedied in 20 minutes with a quick and efficient response. That’s why he recommends Own Recover to his clients and would do the same for any financial services institution running Salesforce.
This article is based on a conversation with Own Champion Elliott Spence. Click here to see how Own can protect your Salesforce data with automated backups, proactive notifications of loss or corruption, and easy-to-use recovery tools.
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