Tackling Salesforce Data Overload: Practical Tips from a Senior Salesforce Admin

• Salesforce-based data bloat comes with hidden costs that are easily avoidable with a smart archiving strategy. 
• Global car rental giant Hertz shares practical tips for how Salesforce organizations can reduce risk and boost performance using a data archiving strategy that scales.
• Own offers solutions that allow companies to confidently backup, recover, and archive their data, prevent data bloat, and ensure efficient operations.

If there’s one thing that Salesforce organizations can rely on, it’s that more data breeds more problems.

Data overload comes with costs that aren’t always immediately identifiable. To avoid larger problems down the line, companies need to tackle data bloat head-on and take back control of their data.

In a recent Own-moderated webinar, Hertz’s Senior Salesforce System Administrator Charlotte Perrill talks about how she helped the car rental behemoth implement a scalable data archiving and backup and recovery strategy with Own. ‍

“We all know that Salesforce is up and running 99.999% of the time,” Charlotte says, “but that 0.001% is enough of a risk to need somewhere to put data should anything go awry.”

‍Read on to learn practical tips from Hertz for effectively reducing both data risk and bloat, and why Own is the archiving—and backup and recovery—solution of choice.

How Hertz uses Salesforce

At Hertz, Charlotte considers herself the “admin’s admin” who “does a little bit of everything and a lot of other things as well.” In her position, she is responsible for data storage, user onboarding and offboarding, and certificate management. 

‍Hertz uses Salesforce as its “system of truth,” Charlotte explains. “We actually set up Salesforce as an answer to a B2B problem: Navigator was retiring [and] we needed a replacement.” 

‍Hertz began with a small pool of no more than 300 users. When it moved to Salesforce in 2020, this user base exploded to 3000, largely due to the fact that Salesforce now houses everything for Hertz—including customer care, loyalty, and the Hertz Premium Roadside Assistance initiative.

As a result, “we needed to make sure that we could back up and recover our data in a secure fashion,” Charlotte says. 

The hidden costs of data bloat

There’s no doubt that growth is good—it’s a sign that Salesforce-enabled businesses are making better use of the resources available to them. Unfortunately, this organic growth also comes with data bloat.

“When [Hertz] moved from that small user group [of 300 users] into the expanse that now is our system of truth, we went from creating 10 to 100 records a day with our B2B folks to creating—on a bad day—3 million records across the business,” Charlotte explains. “On a good day, we can get up to 10 million records.”

As a truly global, 24/7 business, Hertz deals with unending customer queries and rental information that generate a multitude of different records and record types. Hertz and other Own customers point to four major pain points with data growth and bloat:

1. Data downtime and growing complexity in relationships between Salesforce objects can cause user adoption problems. 
2. System performance degradation—due to the sheer volume and complexity of data in orgs, as well as reports that run slowly—can negatively affect team productivity.
3. Storage costs can rise as orgs get slammed with Salesforce bills for exceeding storage allowances.
4. Compliance issues can incur hefty fines and penalties for contravening industry regulations—such as retaining data unnecessarily, manually over-deleting data, or inadvertently falling foul of the GDPR.

These problems only compound over time as companies continue to add more data, resulting in frustrating, unsustainable business scenarios. The risk of things going wrong—from minor mistakes to data loss and corruption events—is high, even during routine, day-to-day operations.

“That data needs to be stored somewhere,” Charlotte emphasizes. “But we can’t keep storing it in Salesforce, because it just grows exponentially.” Thankfully, help is at hand.

How to reduce risk in Salesforce

Having a backup solution in place is the first step in reducing risk in Salesforce, and Hertz knows it. The company has been a valued Own customer for over five years.

“In the old days, we backed up and stored our extra data with a weekly export—which we all know is a terrible idea and not the way forward when you’re trying to protect data,” Charlotte recalls.

‍Organizations can address and reduce the risks associated with Salesforce’s built-in weekly data exports with the right backup and recovery solution. A good backup solution should: 

• Be independent of Salesforce, ensuring quick access to backed-up data and business continuity in the event of Salesforce-wide service disruptions or outages.
• Fully protect critical business data, including metadata, files and attachments, and unstructured data.
• Automatically back up new custom objects, keeping pace with developers’ work.

While having full-coverage backups is absolutely necessary, it’s not sufficient. After all, what good is a backup if you can’t restore the data in its original form? A data recovery mechanism that doesn’t add to an admin’s workload is also crucial. A good data recovery solution should:

• Automatically notify organizations when data loss or corruption events occur.
• Seamlessly help Orgs understand the full scope of what’s happened and exactly what’s missing or corrupted.
• Correctly recover and restore the right subset of data—not all the data.

“If Salesforce went down today and we had to spin up a new org, we could do that, because all of our data is protected,” Charlotte explains. “We don’t have to worry about it.”

Keeping your Salesforce org performant

While a backup and recovery solution is critical for reducing risk, it doesn’t always solve for the data storage issues. Organizations might be tempted to reduce data bloat by buying more storage. But this quick fix soon devolves into a never-ending cycle of more spending on more data. “It becomes an exponential cost,” Charlotte explains. “It’s not financially viable.”

Plus, more space won’t fix performance issues caused by an abundance of unnecessary data within the org—nor does it account for compliance considerations. 

And while manual deletion might decrease overage costs and improve system performance, it still doesn’t guarantee compliance—critical for a 24/7 global company like Hertz operating in many different countries. Manually deleting data is also a time-consuming, labor-intensive, error-prone process that isn’t sustainable for growing orgs.

“You can’t just delete data and pray for the best,” Charlotte says. Instead, archive data that isn’t actively used or required, such as cases closed for more than six months or B2B records left untouched for 18 months. “You can grab that data, ring-fence it with strong archiving policies, and pull it out of production, so you can do better business, day-to-day,” Charlotte explains. Moving millions of records elsewhere frees up space to better support customers. 

For Hertz, Own Archive provided reliability, security, and compliance all in one. “As a solution, Archive answered all of our concerns,” Charlotte says. Using Own Archive lets Hertz:

• Set it and forget it with archiving policies that are tweakable on demand to ensure maximum compliance across environments.
• Archive business-critical data to a safe, secure place in one go.
• Avoid orphaned records with manageable chunks of data, archiving the right data at the right time.
• Pull old, archived records when required for compliance by legal teams.

“Our archiving strategy has gone from one end of the scale to the other: from being completely reactive with our data to now looking at it proactively,” Charlotte emphasizes.

Implement a solid data management strategy that scales

When data grows, the best policies are the ones that help you manage growth before it bloats out of control.For orgs currently experiencing ballooning data, Charlotte recommends:

• Having a robust recovery strategy.
• Archiving data while it’s fully within the control of the business.
• Ensuring customer data is held and stored safely and compliantly. 

This trifecta gives “space to breathe,” says Charlotte, ultimately improving business continuity and data lifecycle management. Own backup and recovery and archiving solutions offer businesses this new source of organizational oxygen that lets them scale confidently without feeling the pressure of ever-expanding data.

‍This story is based on a webinar moderated by Own Product Marketing Manager Shayan Jamshed and featuring Hertz Senior Salesforce System Administrator Charlotte Perrill. Request a live demo with Own experts to see how you can scale your Salesforce org today.