Salesforce powers countless organizations across the globe, consolidating data from various sources including integrations, users, and customers. But as the volume of data increases, so does the necessity for efficient data management. This is especially important at enterprise scale, where data growth is exponential and data models are highly complex.
As we embark on a new year, it’s time to reflect on optimizing our business processes, especially when it comes to managing the ever-growing volume of data in Salesforce. Efficient data management is not just a best practice; it’s a resolution that can enhance and speed up user experience, cut down on storage costs, and streamline data handling.
Decluttering your Salesforce org will enable you to start the year on the right foot. In this article, we’ll dive deeper into Salesforce Data Archiving and why it’s crucial for your business.
What Is Salesforce Data Archiving?
As your Salesforce orgs amass more data over time, some of it gradually loses its immediate importance. However, while not all data requires active access, much of it must still be retained to meet regulatory requirements and for potential future reference.
Salesforce Data Archiving is the process of moving Salesforce data that is not currently in use to a separate storage location for long-term retention. Archiving Salesforce data helps free up space in Salesforce and reduces the cost of storing and managing data.
Archived Salesforce data is typically the older data that is no longer relevant but which must be retained for future reference or regulatory compliance reasons. These data archives are indexed, and can be easily located and retrieved.
Embrace the Benefits of Archiving Salesforce Data
here are several reasons why archiving Salesforce data is a great option for enterprises. A powerful archiving solution can solve:
- System performance
- Compliance and legal issues
- Obsolete data
1. Improved System Performance
The ramifications of excessive data are felt in prolonged report load times, sluggish processes, and potential system failures. Enhancing system speed through data removal not only improves user experience but also bolsters Salesforce adoption – all while reducing business interruptions.
Indicators of poor system performance include:
- Longer search, report execution, and calculation times.
- Exceeding governor limits including storage limits.
- Slower processes like integrations, data protection processes, and data cleaning.
- Failing to meet Service-level objectives (SLOs), such as exceeding the predefined length of time it takes a customer to complete an action on your website.
2. Meet Regulatory Compliance
Various regulations dictate data retention periods. Industry-specific norms may require extended data retention beyond its immediate business relevance.
Data regulation laws and industry-specific norms require businesses to retain certain types of data for specific periods. And so, secure, long-term data storage isn’t just good practice – it’s a legal responsibility.
While data retention is a significant part of your legal obligations, these same regulations often mandate the deletion of or restricted access to specific data after certain periods (or under particular conditions). The principle of data minimization, embedded in laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), requires businesses not to hold more data than necessary and to not keep it for longer than needed.
3. Retain Obsolete Data
Deleting obsolete data might not always be the right thing to do to free up storage space, as doing so can lead to the removal of valuable business data. Archiving Salesforce data effectively instead of deleting it will ensure that you will still have the data if you need it later.
How to Turn Salesforce Data Archiving into a Success Story
- Identify the data: Build the right strategies to identify the data you need to remove. Work with an expert team to learn the best practices and surpass the limits of Salesforce-native queries.
- Retain your data: Retain your data for long storage in a secure encrypted format that provides resilience and immutability. Be certain that the data is secured and safe for decades as your audit trail.
- Remove your data: Securely and orderly remove data from Salesforce at any scale. Queue and balance data loads over days, weeks, or months to maintain the balance of data.
- Design your user experience: Using your own page layouts, design the look and feel so that it’s familiar to your Salesforce users. Design how relationships and links to your CRM data need to work.
Best Practices for Salesforce Data Archiving
To ensure effective Salesforce Data Archiving at enterprise scale, it needs to be planned and analyzed carefully. When archiving, large organizations must plan for:
Storage and Limits
Track how much storage your organization has available and how much is being used. This will help you identify how much storage space you need to clear up, which will in turn help you plan the scope of your archiving project.
Usage Trends
It’s important to understand the data usage metrics in your Salesforce system for effective archiving. Be sure you have the right tools to assess your data volume and track trends.
Use an API to provide multiple dashboards and monitor your data usage and trends. This will help you detect misuse or unusual events.
Parent-Child Relationships and Data Integrity Implications
If you ever need to retrieve the information from the Salesforce data archive and return it to production, it’s important to maintain the parent-child record of the archived object. Otherwise, the data may not be complete or accurate. For instance, if you were to unarchive an account without its associated contacts, it would not be ideal.
And if you are thinking of deleting data from the Salesforce data archive, remember to consult with your organization’s legal team as there could be data integrity implications, such as parent-child relationships and field removal.
Determine How Frequently You Want to Archive Salesforce Data
Determine the archiving frequency for your Salesforce data and create archiving processes that can enable automatic archiving.
Encrypt Your Salesforce Data Archives
Your archived Salesforce data should be encrypted in transit and at rest so that your archives are available only to specific users – only users who should have access to it and nobody else.
Use a Salesforce Archiving Tool
When choosing a Salesforce data backup and Salesforce archiving tool, it is important to opt for a tool that is Salesforce certified and has a successful track record of Salesforce backup and archiving. It should be user-friendly, intuitive, and efficient.
Archiving Salesforce data is essential for large-scale enterprises. As Salesforce data continues to grow, data archiving becomes more critical, as it helps improve Salesforce system performance, automate compliance with regulations like GDPR and CPRA, and reduce storage without losing access to your Salesforce data. To ensure effective data archiving, it is essential to work with experts (such as Odaseva, a leading Enterprise Data Security Platform) to achieve efficient and effective Salesforce data archiving.
Supercharge Your New Year With Odaseva Data Archiving
Enterprises archiving Salesforce data at scale require a comprehensive, platform solution that enables precise data operations to properly control the safe removal of Salesforce data and archive this data at scale.
Odaseva’s expertise in data archiving spans more than 10 years. The Odaseva Enterprise Data Security Platform supports the most advanced Salesforce data archiving use cases among global enterprises.
Odaseva Data Archiving tools include Data Archiver and Archive Viewer:
Final Thoughts
Odaseva allows large enterprises to archive Salesforce data efficiently, at scale, and off-platform, while still providing archived data access to businesses without losing valuable business information.
Make data archiving your first (and easiest) New Year’s resolution. Embrace a leaner, faster, and more compliant Salesforce in 2024.
Learn more about Odaseva Data Archiving for Salesforce here and schedule a demo today!
