“If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It," as Applied to your SaaS Data

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is a saying that reminds us to avoid meddling with what’s already good. That idea, along with its lesser-known corollary, “if it is broken, do fix it,” is a useful way to look at changes to your SaaS data. The reality is many things can go wrong. Consider Salesforce, which specifically warns how easily data can be deleted or overwritten by users and administrators, and how accidental changes to configuration settings are often irreversible. Unsurprisingly, our 2021 State of SaaS data protection report found that human error is one of the leading causes of data loss amongst SaaS users.

Human error can come from a simple keystroke mistake, to an integration with a bad mapping, or just some buggy code. These unintentional data changes can significantly impact your productivity, bottom line, and overall customer experience. This is the “broken” part, if you will.

But while data changes caused by human error are clearly unintentional, SaaS data changes in intentional ways all the time. By their very nature, CRM applications like Salesforce are built to help companies capture and organize data changes in real time. Dozens, if not thousands of users make valid updates to records every day, from a sales rep entering a new opportunity to a customer support rep logging a service request. Similarly, new, valuable data comes in through successful integrations, batch updates, and code.

But if the unwanted changes aren’t fixed, the health of the data is compromised, and so is users’ trust in the data and the application. Users will run across data that’s missing or just doesn’t “look right,” stopping them in their tracks as they try to get work done or make important decisions about how to move the business forward.

SaaS application owners turn to backup and recovery solutions to recover from data loss and corruption regardless of the cause, whether that’s a service disruption, malicious activity by bad actors, or any number of other causes. But most of these solutions aren’t designed to easily recover from scenarios that require rolling back only unwanted changes while leaving desirable changes intact — to easily fix only the “broken” parts and leave the “ain’t broke” parts alone.

While basic solutions may allow you to restore a selected object to a selected point in time, they also force you to restore all the records for that object, potentially undoing some desired changes. Or, they may allow you to restore a selection of records for a given object, but only through using CSV files to filter the records.

CSV files come with their own limitations though, as you might need to navigate hundreds of records with dozens of columns in order to select only the records you want to restore. Plus, depending on your organization’s governance and security policies, downloading records as CSV files may not even be an option in the first place.

A better approach: Own Precision Repair

At Own, we thought there had to be a better way. There had to be a way for your backup solution and recovery solution to not only help you when the untimely disaster strikes, but be helpful for those unwanted changes from everyday slip ups as well. That’s what drove us to build our new Precision Repair capabilities that we launched in Beta today. Precision Repair provides a visual, interactive, and end-to-end experience that makes it easier than ever to identify and correct only the unwanted changes to your SaaS data.

Precision Repair is part of Own Recover and will help you:

• Survey all changes to an org’s data at a glance
• Efficiently zero in on unwanted changes
• Quickly restore data with confidence
• Avoid the compliance risks and complexity of CSV files

What does this mean for your business? The ease of repairing data will enable day-to-day upkeep in Salesforce and eliminate the deterioration of the health of your data over time. In turn, users’ trust in the data will continue to increase and promote confidence in decision-making.

Want to see it for yourself? Ask us for a demo below, or if you’re an Own customer, ask your Customer Success Manager how you can access the Beta.

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