Restoration software needed
Before partnering with Own, Anthony and his team were manually exporting to a SQL server on a semi-regular basis. While this process may have been sufficient in theory, pitfalls were abound—the approach was time-consuming and couldn’t guarantee data recovery if disaster struck.
Anthony knew that data loss could happen at any time—and was most likely to stem from within. “It’s user error or developer error that we are concerned about,” he explains. “Because we are part of the state, we share [data] with other boards and commissions. It meant that there were a lot of users working in our Salesforce org at once.”
This created complexities in the data that required careful management. “Maintaining those parent/child relationships during a recovery would be a nightmare,” Anthony summarizes.
Concept, proven
Anthony knew AZ ROC needed a backup and recovery solution. But, as he scoured the market, he realized his organization needed more: a solution that would support the data and its evolution.
In their search, Anthony and his team were impressed that Own included a proof of concept. They were able to put their data into Own’s platform and try the product for themselves.
AZ ROC’s top objective was to streamline its Recovery Time Objective (RTO)—the maximum acceptable time a system can be down after an unexpected disaster or failure occurs.
In order to equate the value from Own to Anthony’s stakeholders, he needs to be able to assess what damage would occur to their bottom line and reputation if they were not able to help their customers, the public and contractors, for a day, three days, a week, two weeks, etc.
During the proof of concept, their RTO with Own went from over a day to just one hour.
“Thanks to the proof of concept, we quickly saw the difference between [our manual] weekly exports and enlisting the help of Own. With Own, we were able to get back to work faster [after a disaster], making it an easy choice for us,” Anthony explains.
Anthony has seen periods of system outages in the past resulting from planned system migrations and other such events. These are always hard for the team and the longer they last, the harder it is for them to recover. If they were to have a real emergency that required them to do a manual restore from other databases, it would take them days. This would have a cascading effect on their productivity, and therefore their ability to serve their customers in a timely manner, for months. Knowing that they can restore quickly helps them plan for emergencies with greater confidence.
Building better with Own
Within minutes of their purchase, Anthony and his team were enjoying the streamlined data protection provided by Own.
“The proof of concept gave us more than enough information to set everything up ourselves. Implementation could not have been easier,” he says.
Prior to Own, Anthony had one staff member spend a considerable amount of time each week doing manual data backups. Since implementing Own, this effort has been reduced considerably, allowing their FTE to focus on other duties that provide greater benefit to our agency and customers.
With Own, AZ ROC can go above and beyond typical Salesforce capabilities. It allows the team to take bigger swings on breakthrough projects, allocating resources to these efforts knowing that Own will be there to help them recover in case something happens while they are otherwise assigned.
And with things like Recover's Export functionality, Own makes it easy to get their data out of Salesforce and into an SQL server. From there, team members were able to create daily backup copies and export them to the SQL space—which played an important role in business reporting.
“It’s been a nice addition that we didn’t know about when we originally started looking at Own,” Anthony adds.
Challenge accepted
Soon after implementing Own’s Backup & Recovery solution, AZ ROC had the opportunity to put it to the test. “We got a little overzealous with some merging of data, and it went a little sideways,” Anthony explains.
The team had established and approved what seemed like a great merge policy—but it turned out to be excessive, requiring the recovery of a large volume of account data.
“We saw it pretty quickly,” Anthony recalls. “The merger rule went into effect overnight. The very first thing, next morning we saw some data that didn’t look quite right. … We took a look and realized what had happened.”
The RTO foreseen in the proof of concept bore out: What would have been a weeks-long slog without Own was now solved in under a day. “Own really saved our bacon on that one,” Anthony quips.
Evolving to archive
Despite rebounding from a potentially disastrous data loss in record time thanks to Own, Anthony and his team took the situation as a wake-up call. Thankfully, they had Backup & Recovery in place to be able to roll back the over-deletion. But the near-miss highlighted the need for a more formal data archive and purge strategy.
AZ ROC operates under a bevy of different statute laws that affect its data retention policies. Some records are transitive and can be deleted as soon as they’re no longer a value. Others have to be kept for 5–10 years. And still others remain in perpetuity. “The oldest go back to the 1930s, so we have a few of those still kicking around,” Anthony explains.
This time, the search for a solution was one-stop. “We already had such a good relationship with Own, and we’re so happy with Backup & Recovery that [Data Archiving] was the natural next step for us,” he emphasizes.
With assistance from Own’s customer support and tutorials, the team was able to create archive and purge policies to safely reduce the amount of data on Salesforce.
Safe data drives value
Having Own gives AZ ROC more than just technical benefits—it ensures peace of mind. Anthony and his team can confidently drive value, knowing they have a backup and recovery solution they can trust.
With the parameters set and policies established, Smart Alerts will let them know if anything is wrong, and the Backup & Recovery features ensure a quick and effective response.
“Having Own frees my team up to work on priority projects,” Anthony concludes. “We can get back to delivering value to the business.
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