Developing a Salesforce Data Archiving Strategy: Best Practices & Benefits

Do you have a cohesive Salesforce data archiving strategy? If not, it’s time to rethink how your organization oversees this stage of the data lifecycle. Archiving dormant data will help you meet compliance requirements, improve system performance, and save on storage and overage costs. Here’s everything you need to know about developing your own data archiving strategy.

What Is Data Archiving?

Data archiving is the process of relocating dormant data out of production in a systematic way. Unlike data backup, which focuses on creating copies of current data for recovery purposes, archiving involves moving data from primary storage locations (e.g., cloud storage or hard drives) to secondary locations for long-term retention.

A data archiving strategy helps your organization free up valuable storage space, improve system performance, and ensure adherence to compliance regulations. Creating a long-term archiving strategy involves identifying which data is no longer necessary for your business's day-to-day operations and building custom retention policies to ensure that data is purged once it meets those predefined constraints.  

What Are the Benefits of Data Archiving?

Creating a Salesforce data archiving strategy will help your business do the following:

Reduce Storage Costs 

By archiving dormant data, your business can reduce the strain on its primary storage systems, thereby facilitating low-cost storage and freeing up resources for other initiatives. Whether you rely on on-premises or cloud-based storage mediums, archiving can offer significant cost savings.

Improve System Performance

Asking your team to work in a cluttered production environment is akin to tasking them with finding a specific box of supplies in a storage room that hasn’t been cleaned or organized in years. While they may eventually find what they are looking for, the process will be tedious and inefficient. 

By archiving dormant information, you can make it easier to find active production data. Additionally, archiving can improve system performance and speed up user response times.

Minimize Risk Surface 

Archiving data reduces the risk exposure in the event of data loss or corruption, ensuring that there is less data in production that could be impacted by a disaster event. Properly archiving your data can support disaster recovery should a data loss or breach occur. With archiving, you can trust that your data is properly organized in an off-premise location, and easily accessible when needed. 

Meet Compliance Requirements 

Between internal policies and industry regulations, organizations must ensure that they meet data compliance requirements, or risk financial, legal, and reputational repercussions. With a robust data archiving strategy, your organization can have a more tactical, intentional approach to custom retention policies, ensuring that you’re staying on the right side of compliance. 

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Data Archiving Best Practices 

Now that you know the basics of data archiving, it’s time to explore how to optimize your processes to promote a more scalable data management strategy. Specifically, you need to:

Automate Archiving Capabilities

Your users have enough competing priorities; they shouldn’t have to comb through production to determine what data can be offloaded to archive. Instead, you should implement custom data retention policies that save as much time as they do storage space. With an automated archiving solution, you can ensure that inactive files are moved to secondary storage locations, improving system and team performance. 

Through automation, you can make data management more cost-effective and efficient. The end result is a cleaner, more organized, and better-maintained production environment.

Ensure Your Data Storage Is Secure

Creating a robust archiving policy that promotes compliant data storage will enhance your information security posture. At a minimum, you should implement encryption and access controls to help safeguard archived data against unauthorized access or tampering.

Remember, archived information can still be valuable to hackers, especially data pertaining to customer contact information and payment card details. As an entity that gathers and stores this information, you are responsible for protecting it. Failing to do so can result in reputational damage and even fines in some instances.

Ensure Data Utility 

Archiving old information will help you ensure data utility within core systems. Implementing an archiving system for critical information can also promote data utility across important business systems like Salesforce. You can remove outdated insights and ensure that the data is relevant, useful, and accurate.

Having access to high-quality information has the potential to accelerate decision-making processes and help you better understand the state of your business. Your team members will benefit as well, as they can trust the information in your system and use it to carry out their daily responsibilities.

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Bring Your Archiving Strategy to Life with Own 

Whether you’re in the planning phase or are looking to pivot your existing strategy, data archiving plays a vital role in your data lifecycle management. And, with the right solution, you can ensure that the archiving process is as effective as it is efficient. 

Own Archive makes it easy to relocate dormant data from production environments, preventing overage costs, improving performance, and ensuring compliance. 

To learn more, visit our data archiving library or request a demo below.