Salesforce development teams are taking control of their dev cycles by bringing the work off-platform and under control.
Salesforce customers around the world found themselves unable to access their accounts for hours on May 11, 2021. An infrastructure issue took the software giant down and left their customers without an estimate as to when services would be restored.
This left users with no choice but to wait patiently (or not so patiently) until Salesforce was able to bring their platform back online, resulting in hundreds of developer hours of unproductive time.
One of the best ways to avoid feeling the effects of Salesforce outages is to take your Salesforce development pipeline off the platform altogether.
What can you expect by taking your development efforts off platform? Are there any other benefits from coding in a new environment?
Here are 6 benefits you can expect from taking your Salesforce development efforts off platform:
1. Reliability
As mentioned earlier, the first benefit from working outside of the Salesforce platform is that you aren’t subjected to these outages.
While all your competitors that work on Salesforce are waiting for their services to be restored, you can continue working without any issues.
The latest Salesforce outage affected customers around the world. Tens of thousands of businesses were left in the dark. The outage was so widespread that it even took out Salesforces’ own status page, meaning that Salesforce itself was burned by relying on its own tech to power its systems.
These outages, unfortunately, are not exactly uncommon. The May 11 incident is the third outage in a two-week period—meaning on-platform development provides only intermittent access to your most critical tools.
However, development teams that work off-platform—using a DevOps platform like AutoRABIT—haven’t had to worry about these devastating effects to productivity.
2. Increased Scalability
The solutions offered within the Salesforce development platform are limited in performance and their ability to scale to higher workloads. This is a result of the underlying Salesforce instance being used. Even highly extensive Salesforce instances are limited in their available resource sets.
Processing can become an issue. This is limited by the availability of processing data within your Salesforce instance.
Data and metadata sets can grow quite large. The size of the sets will influence the overall performance of your Salesforce instance. As these sets continue to grow, the impact on your environment will become increasingly pronounced.
Moving your operations off-platform to a reliable and powerful DevSecOps platform provides you with the ability to grow your Salesforce instance as much as you like without limiting repercussions.
3. Regulatory Compliance
Salesforce is used all around the world. There are a series of specific necessities attached to various industries such as the healthcare industry and the financial industry. These necessities are dictated by regulatory guidelines that stipulate exactly how sensitive information is to be handled, stored, and protected.
Any failure to provide adequate access to these sensitive sets of information can result in stiff fines and penalties.
Outages will affect a company’s ability to properly serve their customers. It doesn’t matter how short or infrequent these outages are. Regulated industries need to be guaranteed that they will have access to their systems, and that is only possible by moving their back-up and restore solutions off platform.
4. Improved Performance
As discussed, Salesforce metadata will continue to grow over time. This includes data sets for all of your records, account information, and functionality considerations. These sets will grow in complexity and become difficult to sort if handled improperly.
Release quality, increased downtime, and exposed sensitive or protected data can result from improperly handled data.
Programming limitations exist within Salesforce, and anybody working on the platform is going to be subject to them. These limitations differ widely from other development platforms and frequently result in scalability limitations when compared with off-platform release management solutions.
Working off platform allows more flexibility in the computational power of your system. And having more control allows you to tailor your experience to your needs.
5. Data Security
Salesforce itself is secure. However, many users will install customizations that drastically reduce the overall security of their development environment. Quality of code and stability of the platform in general are going to have a huge impact on the overall security of your Salesforce instance.
Off-platform options allow users to choose how they want to host their Salesforce environment—either in the cloud or on-premises.
Working in the cloud offers many benefits and is often secure, but working on-premises drastically increases data security when all other best practices are followed. An on-prem DevOps solution is only available off-platform and returns control of your company’s development infrastructure to you.
Physical servers, virtual environments, and private or hosted clouds are not available for a Salesforce-native solution.
6. Unified DevSecOps Platform
An optimized DevSecOps pipeline will involve the integration of a series of solutions—a reliable backup and restore solution, static code analysis, continuous integration and delivery, and more. These solutions can be utilized on the Salesforce platform, but it involves piecing together a variety of discrete technologies.
The ability to access all these solutions within one platform streamlines DevSecOps efforts and reduces overall complexity.
The AutoRABIT platform is the only non-native Salesforce development suite that offers everything you need to remain compliant, produce quality code, and increase release velocity. The recent instability of the Salesforce platform has highlighted the need for serious development teams to consider off-platform solutions to mitigate the impacts of Salesforce downtime.
Moving off platform offers a variety of benefits to Salesforce developers no longer penned in by the limitations of the Salesforce platform itself. The ability to utilize all those benefits from a single location will optimize your DevSecOps pipeline.
