Once you’ve determined why your organization needs a Salesforce data retention policy and you’ve documented all necessary Salesforce data retention policies, you’ll need to implement these policies using a third-party solution or by developing an in-house tool. Either way, you’ll need to ensure that you can efficiently archive the data and completely delete the data as required your business.
Example Scenario: Call Center Case Logging
There are several things to think about if you decide to build out your own archiving solution. Consider this example scenario:
Your call center utilizes Salesforce to log all of your incoming cases. The number of cases has grown out of control, and they’re eating up 90 percent of your Salesforce storage. You need to archive these old cases within Salesforce and free up room for the new incoming cases. What would you do?
1) Implement a Salesforce Record Archiving Policy
First, you’ll need to build a tool that would efficiently run your archiving policy. An archiving policy defines exactly which objects and records need to be archived. Here’s a few questions that you’ll need to answer when building out your policies.
- How will you define your policy to archive records? (i.e. Closed Cases that are >90 days old)
- What other objects need to be archived with the object? (i.e. Tasks, Attachments, etc.)
- How often will the policy run?
- What are the retention requirements for these records?
If your archiving policy changes overtime, it will require maintenance from a developer to update the policies as your archiving requirements change.
2) Enable Access to Archived Salesforce Records
Now that you’ve archived Salesforce records, how will you and end-users access them? It may be necessary for the call center agents to view the old cases. These agents may even need to re-open these cases at a future date. Depending on where the archived records sit, you have a few options:
Option 1: Access to archives directly from your backend storage and then give the necessary files to end-users.
Option 2: Create a component for end-users to view the archived records within Salesforce.
With Option 1, only the database administrator, or whoever has access to the backend storage has the ability to view the archived records, and restore them back into Salesforce.
With Option 2, you have significantly more flexibility, which allows you to set up permissions for your end-users to view and restore the archived records.
Considerations When Building Your Own Archiving Solution
Depending on your requirements and development resources, building your own archiving solution poses many technical challenges. Building a custom solution that exists within and interfaces with Salesforce will require continuous maintenance and enhancement due to the fact that Salesforce has three major releases per year and they frequently update API specifications.
Capability Requirements
Typical enterprise archiving requirements include functional, administrative, security & compliance, and auditing. Do you want to be responsible for maintaining all of these requirements? Specifically:
- Setting custom archiving policies according to business requirements.
- Scheduling archive jobs to run automatically.
- Maintaining parent/child record and attachment relationships.
- Locating and unarchiving data and attachments from the Salesforce user interface.
- Managing permissions for who can perform archiving operations and view archived data.
- Encrypting data in transit and at rest.
- Reporting on Salesforce data storage size, as well as archive storage size.
Monetary and Opportunity Costs
Depending on your requirements, it could be extremely expensive to build your own custom archiving solution for Salesforce. Cost considerations for a homegrown archiving solution for include requirements building, design, setup, development, testing, go live, and maintenance & support. Are you willing to waste months of your employees’ time to built and support a DIY archiving solution?
Additional Considerations
Reliability, scalability, availability, security, and performance should also be considered when determining the best archiving strategy for your organization. Ask yourself these questions...
Why Consider Own Archive
Own Archive can you time, money, and development resources. With a complete archiving solution, your Admins can quickly setup archiving policies, allowing your company to easily free up storage and stay in compliance.
Own’s pre-built Archive solution meets all of an organization’s functional, technical, security, and compliance requirements out-of-the-box, including:
- Zero implementation time or costs.
- No technical debt.
- Lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
- Reduced organizational risk.
- Meets data retention requirements for compliance with regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
- A focus on projects and enhancements that drive revenue for the business.
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