Metadata plays a crucial role in Salesforce and if it’s not properly protected and handled, you could be in for some major headaches.
Why It Matters: Errors, compliance failures, and data security vulnerabilities are all possible when metadata isn’t safeguarded. Costly outages far outweigh the time and effort it takes to pay close attention to how these critical data sets are maintained.
- The average cost of even a minute of downtime ranges from $5,600 to $9,000.
- Metadata describes various aspects of a piece of information, helping to categorize, manage, understand, and use that information more effectively.
- Every action a user performs in Salesforce is connected to a piece of metadata.
Here are 8 ways metadata plays an important role in your Salesforce environment:
1. Customization
One major benefit of working in Salesforce is its ability to be customized. This enables organizations from any industry to leverage the Salesforce platform for their DevOps needs.
Metadata defines customizations like custom objects, fields, page layouts, workflows, and other configurations.
These customizations allow businesses to adapt Salesforce to their unique processes and requirements, which are all driven by metadata. Failing to protect these sets of metadata in Salesforce will lead to misfires and errors.
2. Configuration Structures
Every organization has different needs, so the way your platform is set up needs to be personalized to maximize returns. Configuration refers to the way organizations set up and customizes their Salesforce environment to meet specific business needs without writing code.
Metadata defines and represents these configurations, influencing how the Salesforce instance operates and behaves.
In this instance, metadata is acting as the infrastructure of your Salesforce environment. It is both the foundation and the directions for how your system works.
3. Disaster Recovery
Data loss events are unavoidable. Not that every company will experience one, but you can never completely guard your platform against accidents, cybercriminals, or system outages. And when these worst-case scenarios occur, it’s crucial that you get your system up and running as quickly and comprehensively as possible.
Metadata holds the blueprint for the structure and organization of your Salesforce environment through configuration records.
Metadata needs to be included in your disaster recovery plan and protected as vigorously as other types of sensitive data.
4. Consistency
Your Salesforce environment is likely larger than a single instance. And when your team members are hopping from project to project, you want them to be comfortable and familiar with their surroundings. Creating consistency between these environments is crucial to avoiding errors and streamlining efforts.
Metadata ensures consistency across different Salesforce environments by defining and enforcing data structures, security settings, and business rules across the organization.
Salesforce sandboxes, production instances, and more all benefit from a coherent and consistent structure.
5. Scalability
Every business plans to grow over time. And with this projected growth, you’ll need to expand your Salesforce environment to house all the data and information required to provide your services.
Metadata defines the structure, configurations, and customizations of the platform that allow businesses to expand and adapt to evolving needs.
If you aren’t prepared for your company’s growth, you’ll run into problems as old systems become overwhelmed.
6. History Tracking
A healthy Salesforce DevOps pipeline will include the work of various developers to introduce a series of updates and applications to keep your system current. However, sometimes it can be necessary to weed back through these changes to find the source of errors.
Metadata enables version control, allowing administrators and developers to track changes made to the Salesforce configuration.
This process is essential for maintaining a history of modifications, understanding the evolution of the system, and reverting changes if necessary.
7. Troubleshooting
Mistakes are inevitable; errors occur. And when these problems arise, it’s critical for a Salesforce DevOps team to be able to figure out what went wrong so they can fix it as quickly as possible.
When concerns appear, understanding and analyzing metadata configurations can be instrumental in identifying, isolating, and resolving issues effectively.
This is accomplished through facilitating version control, analyzing configurations, comparing metadata structures between different environments, and more.
8. Auditing + Compliance
Organizations operating in regulated industries have strict requirements for how their data is handled and managed—and this includes metadata.
Metadata provides the necessary structure and information needed to ensure that an organization’s Salesforce instance complies with internal policies, industry regulations, and legal requirements.
Proper management and understanding of metadata configurations are crucial for maintaining compliance within your Salesforce environment.
Next Step…
Now that you have a better understanding of the importance of metadata in Salesforce, let’s look a little deeper into how you can protect it.
Read our blog, 10 Ways to Protect Metadata in Salesforce, to learn more about how to install the proper safeguards for these critical datasets.