Why a Data Recovery Solution Is a Vital Tool in Every Admin’s Toolkit

Editor’s note: This is a sponsored post by OwnBackup, the #1 Cloud Data Protection Platform for Salesforce. 

If you ask any CEO what they want for their Salesforce users, I bet most would answer, “Reliable access to accurate data.” As admins, one of your top priorities is making sure that every user has the right access to the right data. It’s why you invest so much time and effort into building validation rules, integrating richer data from other applications, and ensuring the data is clean, consistent, and useful as time goes on.

But what happens when — despite your best efforts — the data “breaks”? When it doesn’t give you the expected information? Yes, you test, and test, and rebuild. But what if on the day of deployment, Murphy’s law kicks in and — *poof* — data is lost or corrupted?

Although most people don’t think of a backup and recovery tool when they think of the health of their data, the right tool can help make all data disruptions less painful, regardless of their cause.

What are data disruptions?

Data disruptions, or data “breaks,” can come in different forms and all negatively impact business continuity. While the biggest data disruption is rare, its impacts are widespread and felt right away: a service disruption. This type of disruption can have major consequences and negatively impact revenue generation, customer service, and productivity.

A service disruption can leave you feeling helpless, but there are concrete steps you can take. If your backup solution is accessible outside Salesforce, it can be a valuable source for the critical information your business stakeholders will need for continuity.

Although big data disruptions happen, smaller types of data disruptions are more common. In fact, 72% of data loss and corruption is caused by user error during day-to-day work. When you consider the typical ongoing stream of projects to improve the system with richer data and workflows, it’s easy to see how these errors can creep in.

Top causes of Salesforce data loss

Integration errors

These can occur when you extend Salesforce with new applications like a marketing automation or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, or enrich data with third-party feeds to enable more effective prospect outreach. Due to the complexity of setting up these integrations, ensuring configurations and mappings are correct can be very difficult, and data loss and corruption as these applications and feeds are integrated can be common.

Customization errors

Developers and administrators are constantly working on custom objects, new fields, workflows, and triggers so that the application better supports business needs. With the pace and volume of changes, it’s inevitable that some code with errors is going to be deployed, which can cause inadvertent data loss or corruption in the production system.

Cleanup errors

It’s a rare moment when system data is as clean as it could be. De-duplication of records, mass changes to field values to accommodate new business processes, and harmonizing inconsistent field values are all examples of mass updates to support data cleanup. All of these updates present the possibility of data loss or corruption when the wrong where clauses or filter criteria are used.

These scenarios are different from the service disruption because you don’t know right away that a data loss or corruption has occurred, and because they impact only certain objects, records, or fields. A backup and recovery solution that notifies you when unusual data loss occurs helps you quickly identify which data needs to be restored and enables you to restore just those records or fields.

Hit the reset button

As an admin, how many times have you wished you could just get in a time machine and stop yourself from pressing that button or making that little error that disrupted an entire project? While a magic time machine doesn’t exist, OwnBackup does — and it’s the top-rated backup and recovery solution on AppExchange.

OwnBackup helps you cope with all forms of data disruption. It has notifications that let your team know when records have been deleted or compromised in any way, giving them an opportunity to address issues before they impact the business. It’s also standalone from the Salesforce Platform — so you can have controlled access to data to enable continuity!

Check it out and you’ll see that OwnBackup will help you on a day-to-day basis, shifting your time from firefighting to building out new ways to make the business more effective.