7 Ways to Navigate Salesforce Data Migration Challenges
Salesforce’s complexities make it difficult to confidently migrate data. However, with the help of Salesforce data migration tools, these challenges can be addressed to support reliability, security, and compliance.
Why It Matters: Data migration is a critical function in Salesforce DevOps to save time, support testing, and produce reliable deployments. Salesforce doesn’t make this easy, though. Complex structures and the breadth of data to be migrated can make this a complicated process.
- Improperly timed data migrations can lead to costly downtime for an organization.
- Strict attention and consistency are required to migrate data while maintaining complex data relationships.
Here are seven things you can do to streamline Salesforce data migrations:
- Automate Migration Processes
- Implement Incremental Migrations
- Clean Your Data
- Utilize Data Mapping
- Validate Data After Migrations
- Establish Data Governance Policies
- Backup Your Data Prior to Migration
1. Automate Migration Processes
Manual processes are clunky and prone to errors, particularly if they are highly repetitive. This is a drum we beat all the time, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Salesforce data migrations handle large amounts of data and can be run numerous times.
Automated Salesforce data migration tools are the only way to guarantee the reliability of your results.
Data migration tools can automate the extraction of data from various sources, including legacy systems, databases, spreadsheets, and third-party applications.
2. Implement Incremental Migrations
We mentioned how large datasets are often migrated within Salesforce. Approaching these large datasets all at once is risky because a small error can impact the entirety of the migration.
Migrate your data in batches instead of all at once to reduce the risk of data errors and simplify troubleshooting if any issues arise.
Incremental migrations are much easier to manage, simplifying the approach for your team.
3. Clean Your Data
Inconsistencies and errors grow within your Salesforce environment over time. This could include duplicates, irregularities, and inaccuracies within your Salesforce data.
Clean up your datasets prior to performing a migration to eliminate these unnecessary and incorrect datasets, streamline processes, and maintain data integrity within your environments.
Automated tools are available to scan your Salesforce repositories for anything that doesn’t meet your organization’s quality standards.
4. Utilize Data Mapping
Salesforce is complex. There are a massive number of interrelated fields and dependencies that need to be maintained to avoid misfires, lost data, and exposures.
Map out the source data fields to their corresponding fields in Salesforce to ensure that the data mapping is accurate and comprehensive.
This helps prevent data loss and avoid misalignment during the migration process.
5. Validate Data After Migrations
Taking all the proper steps prior to a data migration will give you the best chances of seeing the expected results at the end. However, even if all the proper planning steps are taken, it’s still critical to verify everything came out how it should.
Implement robust validation processes to verify the accuracy and completeness of migrated data.
Conduct thorough testing after a migration so any discrepancies between the source and target data can be fixed.
6. Establish Data Governance Policies
An existing rubric of organization and data handling drastically improves the process of verifying the success of your data migrations.
Establish data governance policies and procedures to maintain data quality and consistency post-migration.
Define roles and responsibilities for data management within your organization to ensure ongoing data integrity in Salesforce. Check out our blog on eight Salesforce data governance best practices.
7. Backup Your Data Prior to Migration
The safest processes are the ones that are ready for worst-case scenarios. Salesforce data backups are a critical aspect of data protection that needs to be maintained at all times—including right before a data migration.
Backup your data and implement robust recovery mechanisms before starting the migration process to mitigate the risk of data loss.
Unforeseen problems are always possible. A recent data backup ensures that even if a massive data loss event occurs, you won’t risk falling out of compliance with data protection regulations, experience costly downtime, or saddle your team with lengthy recovery processes.
Next Step…
Salesforce data migration tools are a critical aspect of maintaining a reliable pool of data. Your Salesforce data is valuable and requires constant attention to keep data quality levels high.
Check out our ebook, “The Definitive Handbook to Quality Management in Salesforce DevOps,” to learn everything you need to know about raising the quality of your system data and keeping it there.
FAQs
What are the most common Salesforce data migration challenges?
Data migrations offer critical benefits, but any degradations in data quality during the migration process can lead to problems. The complexity of this data poses a major challenge. The mapping of source data fields to Salesforce objects, for instance, requires strict attention. Salesforce is often an organization’s largest container of data. This means the sheer volume of data to be moved makes migration processes even more difficult. Maintaining quality, resolving mismatches in data formats, and managing dependencies between data elements all add up to a complex process.
Why migrate data in Salesforce DevOps?
Migrating data enables developers to test their updates with realistic datasets. This better enables them to develop and test new features and customizations. This migrated data can be used by testing and quality assurance teams to validate the functionality and performance of Salesforce applications in realistic scenarios. Data migration enables teams to perform user acceptance testing and deployment verification before the changes are deployed to production, reducing the risk of errors or discrepancies in live environments. These processes facilitate the development, testing, and deployment of high-quality Salesforce applications while adhering to best practices and regulatory requirements.
What are the benefits of automating Salesforce data migrations?
Automating any repetitive task increases the efficiency, accuracy, and scalability of the results—and Salesforce data migrations are no exception. Utilizing Salesforce data migration tools to address these critical processes reduces manual efforts while accelerating the transfer of data, ensuring consistent and accurate results no matter how many migration runs your team needs. These tools can efficiently handle large datasets, optimizing resource allocation. And as always, automated tools reduce the risk of costly human errors. These resources offer robust validation and error handling mechanisms, mitigating migration risks and ensuring data integrity.
