How would an unrecoverable Salesforce data corruption impact your customers' business?

As organisations pursue digital transformation to respond quickly to evolving market conditions, the need for robust data protection strategies can’t be overlooked. The data landscape is constantly changing with data corruption or loss becoming more and more frequent every day. Protecting valuable business data is critical to efficient business operations.

All businesses need a comprehensive solution that enables full data protection coverage, as well as recovery options that fit various restore scenarios. Most companies apply data protection best practices to their on-premises data, however valuable business and customer information residing in the cloud is often overlooked.

However, proper data protection is essential for any cloud-based platform. This includes protection of data to the same cloud location - as well as having the option to create multiple copies of data in another cloud or an on-premises location.

Salesforce retires its Data Recovery service

Like any data, Salesforce has the potential for data corruption or loss, either as a result of user error or malicious intent. Regardless of the cause, the end result is loss of productivity, and an impact to revenue.

Salesforce announced the retirement of its Data Recovery service, effective July 31st, 2020. Although some native options to back up data will continue to be provided, there are limitations with these which include:

• Data exports not inclusive of all objects
• No compliance options for sensitive data
• No metadata recovery (not included in SFDC restore).

Salesforce themselves recommend that customers use a third-party backup solution instead of their native solution – and this is even more relevant following the recent announcement.

Ask your customers this question: “How impactful would Salesforce data corruption be to your business without the ability to recover?” We anticipate it would be significant.

Commvault 

Not all data protection solutions are equal. Customers need protection and restoration for all custom objects, files, and content. Commvault protects:

• Standard objects: default objects used to store data such as accounts and contacts
• Custom objects: custom objects created used to store data such as invoices
• Files: standard documents, attachments, and libraries
• Salesforce CRM content: metadata, layouts, app settings, and profiles
• Relationships: links between objects (e.g. parent and child)

Commvault for Salesforce protection

Commvault integrates with the native Salesforce APIs to provide a complete data protection, retention, and recoverability solution. Automated processes reduce overhead and complexity while providing advanced capabilities such as encryption, search, scheduling, data masking, sandboxing, storage reduction and data comparison. This means your customers’ Salesforce data is protected, recoverable, and managed the way they want it to be – according to their own specific SLAs and policies.

Commvault augments and enhances the existing Salesforce protection by providing a fully featured data protection solution that enables:

• Export of all objects
• Self-defined retention – no recycle bin limitations
• Built in compliance and e-discovery solution
• Low cost recovery
• Metadata recovery
• Long-term retention
• Self-defined SLAs (RPO/RTO)
• Self-service recovery

The Commvault Difference

Commvault’s backup and recovery license for mailboxes and cloud applications includes SFDC, Office 365, and G Suite bundled together in a single low-price license providing huge value to customers. Commvault’s competitors charge separately per application user and don’t bundle. With Commvault, there is no uplift charged for SFDC, placing extreme pricing pressure on the competition.

Why Salesforce data protection now? 

Previously your customers had an ‘on-demand’ insurance policy through the Salesforce Data Recovery service. Although it was slow and expensive, customers were not required to pay anything unless an event happened, so many were comfortable that “if something happened, they would simply pay.” With the retirement of the Data Recovery service in July, customers will no longer be able to access this insurance policy should something go wrong with their data.

Q & A with Rachel Zhang - Dicker Data Commvault Presales Specialist

What is the level of risk we are talking about if a company experiences data loss or corruption?

That depends on what the data is that has been lost or corrupted. If it is critical business data such as key customer information or highly confidential company IP for example, the risks can be significant.

Not only can it take a lot of time and resources to recover or worse, to recreate, but the loss of key data can also cause a direct impact to customers and their relationship to an organisation. Relationship damage of this nature can be catastrophic to a business.

What are the top 3 things a partner should advise their customers of it they don’t have a robust data protection strategy in place for their cloud applications like Salesforce?

With the move to Cloud applications, some customers become complacent thinking that their cloud provider will have data protection built in, however this is rarely the case.

1. Data regulations such as GDPR extend to all areas they have sensitive customer data, including those hosted in Cloud applications.
2. Cloud applications require a different approach rather than simply ‘backing up a vm’. You need to understand the application, the customers configuration and their use cases.
3. Securing the backup process is critical as you can not simply install a backup agent. There are multiple steps of access and each needs to be secured and encrypted.

How Dicker Data helps

Dicker Data is the sole distributor for Commvault in Australia with both companies working closely together to provide technical and sales support to help the Australian partner community thrive.

The Dicker Data Commvault team already work with many resellers and have established procedures to streamline operations and reduce costs for partners while ensuring no opportunity is ever missed. Tina Phillips from Dicker Data said, “Our team is highly certified and has a core focus on assisting partners in certifying their staff in the latest data Commvault protection technologies. We can offer comprehensive training and enablement from technical presales through to deal closure support, as well as ensuring our partners have access to vendor alliance solution opportunities, financing and credit facilities.”