Own enables the Make-A-Wish CRM team to take a proactive approach to data ownership and protection
A wish experience can be a game-changer for a child with a critical illness. To help support their important mission, Make-A-Wish undertook a massive data transformation initiative to move off legacy applications and on to Salesforce.
Make-A-Wish relies on Salesforce to manage the wish granting process and further advance their vision to grant the wish of every eligible child. Shannon Paderes, the foundation's Salesforce Technical Manager, required a backup and recovery solution that would meet RPO and RTO requirements and provide strong data protection compliant with regulatory standards.
Challenges
Concerned about their preparedness to deal with the scale of the data changes they were about to make, the team required a reliable data protection plan prior to embarking on the project.
They needed a safety net during the Lightning transition to ensure data was backed up, both pre-transition and during the process.
Weekly export would not meet their RTO/RPO needs as data was being backed up every seven days.
Saving .csv files on servers made the process to restore data extremely manual and cumbersome. The relationships between the data in the csv exports would take too long to restore with a high probability to lose some.
The team lacked the ability to monitor data changes and identify data loss.
Risk of data loss increases as more chapter users and functionality are added to the system.
Local chapters not having access to the data that drives the wish granting process – which would negatively impact children in receiving life-changing wishes.
Solutions
Make-A-Wish has assurance that if something were to happen, they could act quickly to restore data and protect against any future data loss.
Own met all business requirements, including data backup and anonymization, sandbox seeding, and compliance.
Daily backups ensure the team is able to meet RTO/RPO requirements.
They are confident that as their use of Salesforce grows, their data will continue to be protected.
The team can now monitor data loss, corruption or human errors and view data changes day to day, isolate specific data and do a precision restore in minutes.
Metadata is preserved, keeping the complex relationships between records intact, making it easy to roll back with prior restore settings and avoid costly disruptions.
Own takes the pressure off the team by not having to worry about data loss.
Challenges
Using all sandbox types to push changes thru Dev, QA, UAT and production.
With multiple developers and outside consultants working in various sandboxes of all types, they needed to spin up sandboxes quickly.
Native tools such as Sandbox Refresh and Data Loader required too much configuration and were a slow, cumbersome, manual process.
The seeding process required too much time to monitor and too many eyes on the screen.
Spending too much time pushing data around. Developers need to deliver new code, features and value to the business quicker.
Solutions
Accelerate streamlines the entire seeding process, saving the team time and reducing release cycles.
Own can complete a typical seed job in less than one hour with no need to monitor, so the team can work on other projects.
Provides the ability to work with real-life data from the production environment.
Allows for “real-world” tests as new features or enhancements to existing features are developed.
The ability to turn off automation during the seeding process prevents triggers from firing and causing issues downstream.
Delivers value to the business faster and cements the strategic value of IT.
For children diagnosed with critical illnesses, a wish come true can be a crucial turning point in their lives. A wish can be that spark that helps these children believe that anything is possible and gives them the strength to fight harder against their illnesses. This impact is why we are driven to make every one of these wishes come true.
A wish experience can be a game-changer for a child with a critical illness. This one belief guides us in everything we do at Make-A-Wish. It inspires us to grant life-changing wishes for children going through so much. It compels us to be creative in exceeding the expectations of every wish kid. It drives us to make our donated resources go as far as possible. Most of all, it's the founding principle of our vision to grant the wish of every eligible child.
WITH Make-A-Wish® creates life-changing wishes for children with critical illnesses. Research shows that children who have wishes granted can build the physical and emotional strength they need to fight a critical illness. A wish gives children renewed energy and strength, brings families closer together and unites entire communities.
Make-A-Wish is the world’s leading children’s wish-granting organization, operating in every community in the United States and in nearly 50 countries worldwide. Together with generous donors, supporters, staff and more than 30,000 volunteers across the U.S., Make-A-Wish delivers hope and joy to children and their families when they need it most.
