Salesforce has become a critical platform for thousands of businesses looking to transform customer interactions. These organizations depend on the accuracy and integrity of Salesforce data. Any data loss, for whatever reason, can have disastrous consequences.
Human error is responsible for over 60% of data loss. Understanding how users might inadvertently cause data loss is the first step to safeguarding your Salesforce data
1. Accidentally deleted data
Hitting the delete key by mistake is not uncommon, and Salesforce developers have thoughtfully provided the Recycle Bin to rectify such gaffs. But it’s not always possible to recover accidentally deleted data, especially if the error isn’t noticed for several days or even weeks. This problem often occurs when too many staff have admin privileges for your Salesforce org.
2. Data migration problems
Migrating data from one org to another is a manual process and prone to human error. Data from the source org may be missed in the move to the destination. Poor field mapping and formatting can also lead to errors. If using the Salesforce Data Loader to import data, be sure that users do not upload bulk data and overwrite good data that already exists.
3. Systems integration
It’s common to integrate Salesforce with third-party applications, such as HubSpot, and with internally developed systems. Although Salesforce and the developers of other apps work to make integration a smooth process, it’s often messy and problematic. Changes made on one system might not propagate to the other, and different systems can have different levels of acceptable data quality. These and many other integration factors can cause data loss.
4. Malicious users
It can be difficult to guard against a Salesforce user who has malicious intent, such as a disgruntled employee with admin access. Data breaches and hacking have also become a fact of life for all businesses. It is vital to monitor who has admin privileges and ensure that your users follow all security best practices.
5. Coding errors
Despite the best efforts of QA departments, buggy code can get deployed to your production org and can lead to corrupted or lost data. This is predominantly due to lack of thorough testing or lack of access to relevant test data.
Salesforce data loss will happen to your business, and it’s difficult to predict when it will happen, but you can prepare for it. A good backup and recovery solution will minimize the disruption to your business operations from lost data. Knowing that Salesforce data is safe can also have a liberating effect on your users, allowing them to be more creative and explore greater efficiencies without the constant fear of causing business problems through potential data loss.
Vault gives you flexible backup and restore options for Salesforce data. With support for automated full and incremental backups, Vault enables single-click recovery to any point in the past, based on field, record, or full backup restore. Use Vault to put your data protection plan on steroids.