Devinder: Hi Shashwat. Thank you for joining us this morning. If you wouldn't mind just starting off with a quick introduction, that will be fantastic.
Shashwat: Sure. I'm Shashwat Narain, a Salesforce architect at Metso for the last four years or so. Apart from my regular Salesforce architect responsibilities, I'm also looking after the data backup and recovery for Salesforce.
Devinder: Fantastic. So you've been an Own customer at Metso for some time now, but why originally did you feel that you needed a Salesforce backup solution?
Shashwat: Well, our Salesforce instance is expanding at a great pace. And the landscape itself is expanding with a lot more integrations to different systems....because of these factors, our CRM data was becoming more and more critical.
And this can happen when you have a lot of users or integrations updating your data. Then when we realized that we needed a backup solution, we found that although Salesforce has the Weekly Export feature, it was kind of inadequate for the reasons that you mentioned earlier, including data recovery. We also tried some custom solutions like API-based solutions, but the cost of maintaining those was huge. So that's when we considered buying something on top of the existing Salesforce solution. And we started discussing Own.
Devinder: That’s great. What were your thoughts around your RPO and RTO and why was it important to improve those?
Shashwat: Yeah, so we try to define these parameters as to how long can we afford to be in a data loss situation, or how long can we afford a business disruption and how much data can we afford to lose.
Devinder: Got it. You went on this journey of trying to identify an appropriate solution. As you were going through that evaluation, what were some of the key learnings that you could share with our audience?
Shashwat: So one of the key learnings for us is that the backup speed is very important; the cycles must finish quickly otherwise it starts to impact your RPO. And the other thing is that there should be an automated way to restore data because you might have your backup in place, but having the backup is one thing—the ability to restore the backup quickly is another.
Devinder: So optimized backup times, ability to easily restore, minimize the RPO and RTO. So, if you didn't have those things, what would have been the impact at a business level?
Shashwat: I can imagine that the costs of not having a backup solution or not being able to restore the data would be huge. There are direct costs to the business because at Metso, Salesforce is a central part of our landscape. And it's so connected to different systems that we would start incurring additional costs if the system was down.
Devinder: And how about compliance? Was GDPR something you had to consider and does Own help you with your GDPR initiatives?
Shashwat: Yes, of course. With Metso being a Finnish company, we are bound by GDPR regulations. And one of the key principles of GDPR is to minimize personal data copies.
Devinder: We talked about having your backup running in the background and also being easy to restore when you need it. But what about on a day to day basis? Does Own help you in any way with some of the projects that you're running on a more regular basis?
Shashwat: Yeah, it does. There are very handy features like Enhanced Sandbox Seeding, for example, when we start to develop a new project and we need some data in the sandbox. Earlier our developers used to create that data or do data loads and then create the relationships hierarchies and it was time consuming for us. But the Sandbox Seeding feature allows us to copy data to the sandboxes with relationships and hierarchies, and we can choose the level of relationship which we want to bring to the sandbox.
Own has plenty of other useful features like Smart Alerts, which tell us what has changed in the Sandbox in terms of data and metadata. And it helps us with data integrity as well, because if we notice some outliers in the data, for example, if we get like 1000 cases created in a given day, and we see that the rest of the week, the average is like a 100 cases, then we know that there is something wrong. So it makes us more intelligent in terms of our processes and the business operations.
Devinder: Well, Shashwat, I'm glad you're really getting the full value out of Own. Before we jump into the demo and actually look at some of these great features, we have the Data Recovery service from Salesforce retiring at the end of July. What would be your advice to our audience?
Shashwat: Based on my experience of evaluating backup solutions and my experience of handling a large CRM system, I would say that data recovery and backup is absolutely vital for any organization.
Devinder: Thank you, Shashwat for sharing your insights. Your experience is extremely valuable, and we really appreciate your time joining us this morning.
.png){kind=logo}
