Properly managing your Salesforce data involves the utilization of multiple methods. There are a variety of potential threats to the integrity of your data and it is incredibly difficult—if not impossible—to completely guard against all of them.
Maintaining multiple identical and simultaneous Salesforce instances can protect your data, increase reliability, and improve network performance.
Salesforce data replication is the means of achieving these multiple instances. It is the process of storing data in numerous locations. This can help move data from one Salesforce org to another. There are multiple reasons for doing this, including allowing a developer to write and test code without wasting time migrating data.
But that’s not the only benefit. Salesforce data replication also allows you to host identical data in multiple locations.
This reduces lag seen by teams operating in vastly different geographic locations by moving a copy of the instance to a nearby server. This improves the performance of the network, user experience, and test system performance. And should a singular server experience a data loss event, you’ll still have access to a complete copy in another location.
Salesforce data replication is a powerful tool that can improve your Salesforce environment and contribute to data security. Adherence to a few simple best practices will help you see the highest returns from utilizing this important functionality.
Here are 10 considerations to keep in mind to maximize the benefits of Salesforce data replication:
1. Identify the Necessary Scope of Replication
What data will you be targeting? It might not be necessary to replicate the entirety of your Salesforce environment. Data storage costs will increase as you replicate more data so it’s in your best interest to only replicate essential data.
Choosing between a full replication or a selective replication will ensure your data storage costs don’t unnecessarily climb.
However, you should also be sure to replicate everything you need. Don’t leave anything out because of cost considerations.
2. Mask Production Data
Your production data
is liable to be sensitive. Minimizing the exposure of this data will also minimize the chances it will become compromised.
Data masking is an important tool to maintain data security measures. Make sure to mask any sensitive data as it’s being transferred.
There are many methods of masking data such as encryption, anonymization, and pseudonymization. There are also various masking algorithms available that are specific to Salesforce data replication processes.
3. Protect Relationship Integrity
Dependencies and relationships between various types of data are essential to proper operation within your Salesforce instance. Losing these relationships will have a negative effect on the overall operation of your Salesforce environment.
Safeguard data dependencies by utilizing a Salesforce data replication tool that detects and preserves relationships associated with a data object.
These types of dependencies are often customizable and can likely be configured in the settings for the replication tool.
4. Test Everything
Verification of proper transfers is always a good idea. There are bound to be occasionally blips and even a slight mistake can have wide-ranging impacts on the accuracy of your data.
Test production environments, data relationships, and anything else that will impact how your users interact with your Salesforce environment.
A powerful replication tool will likely ensure these types of transfer mistakes don’t occur, but you will be very happy you spent the time to test your data when proper functionality is required.
5. Include Metadata
Metadata plays a huge role in the proper functionality of your Salesforce environment and the accuracy of your data sets. A failure to include metadata in the scope of your Salesforce data replication efforts might save on storage but will negatively impact your environment.
Metadata must be included in the scope of your replication efforts to maintain data relationships and linked fields.
It can be easy to focus on system data since the value can be more apparent. However, metadata is also an essential aspect of a complete system.
6. Split Up Replication Tasks
Putting a singular team member in charge of all replication tasks can create potential problems. First, this person could make a mistake and not catch it. Second, this person could unknowingly compromise the data in both locations.
Split up the tasks—nominate one team member as the product manager to define the processes, and another as the replication manager to carry them out.
Splitting up the responsibilities increases accountability and reduces the potential for costly errors.
7. Maintain a Singular Source of Truth
Creating multiple active environments can become confusing. Conflicting data and inconsistent records can create problems moving forward.
Identify one singular instance of your Salesforce data to be the main and trusted source of information.
Unifying your Salesforce data ensures mistakes are made and built upon to create larger headaches down the road. Communicate the designated source of truth to ensure updates aren’t made within the incorrect environment.
8. Archive Unnecessary Data
We’ve mentioned how data storage can become an issue with Salesforce data replication. Duplicating large sets of data will require large backup and storage repositories.
Archive any unused data so you don’t waste resources on replicating and storing data that doesn’t provide an immediate benefit.
Archiving data will be possible through usage of a complete data backup and recovery tool. Be sure to replicate essential data but there will often be some data sets that can be set aside.
9. Replicate During Low Traffic Periods
It can take a lot of resources to perform a Salesforce data replication—to the point where it can impact website performance. It’s best to time out these operations to when it will least impact your end users.
Schedule replications for late night or early morning hours to reduce any potential negative impacts for your customers or team members.
Consider when people are interacting with your system the most and be sure to avoid those times to perform data replications.
10. Integrate with a Powerful Backup & Recovery Tool
Salesforce data replication is a tool in a larger data management strategy. Archiving, backups, restoring, and replicating all serve to support the larger strategy of securely and properly protecting your Salesforce data.
Utilizing a powerful Salesforce data backup & recovery tool is the best way to see the greatest benefits.
Unifying your data management plan around a singular tool ensures that your efforts work together to provide the desired result.
FAQs
Data replication helps developers move data from one Salesforce org to another, which allows them to write and test code without wasting time migrating data.
Salesforce data replication is the means of achieving multiple instances. It is the process of storing data in numerous locations and can help move data from one Salesforce org to another. It also allows you to host identical data in multiple locations.
Maintaining multiple identical and simultaneous Salesforce instances can protect your data, increase reliability, and improve network performance.
Is Salesforce data replication encrypted?
Salesforce replicates customer data from the primary to the secondary data center at near real-time speed thanks to a 10-gigabit WAVE network built with inline high-speed ethernet encryptions. This process depends on an encrypted network to protect your data. Backup media never leaves a secure Salesforce data center facility unless you choose to destroy or retire the data through a secure channel.
What are the steps for data replication in Salesforce?
There are several steps involved in a typical data replication process:
- Determine whether the structure of the object you wish to replicate has changed since the last request.
- Call getUpdated(), passing in the time span and object to retrieve your data.
- Pass in all of the IDs available to you in an array.
- Call getDeleted(), passing in the object and time span so the Salesforce API can retrieve the IDs for the data that matches your permissions.
- Next, iterate through each of the returned array of IDs.
- Finally, you have the option to request any time spans you’d like to view in the future by using the getDeleted() latestDateCovered command.
What are the benefits of Salesforce data replication tools?
Salesforce data replication tools provide a powerful method of protecting your information with redundancy. Other advantages include:
- Transactional process: Transactional data streams through more than one location for housing in a wide variety of places. Data replication eases this phase of the process by eliminating the dependency on one data source, while additional operations also maximize the durability of the process.
- System data: Hardware failures can prove catastrophic to data protection. Data replication distributes the load of data copies across numerous computers and even network services with accessibility.
- Network reads: As data inevitably becomes read over and over across a wide network, it can experience corruption. Replication allows users to route data throughout an entire network of machines to boost application performance.
- Processing power: Data replication distributes the workload of processing power across multiple machines to create simultaneous updates. This process protects the integrity of data and increases your capacity for loading and transforming it.
- Mask data: Data duplication allows administrators and developers to boost their information security by masking Salesforce data. You can select from a variety of masking algorithms to protect personal customer details and production data.
- Relationship integrity: One major issue with system backups is the potential for confusion during the restoring process for practical use. Proper data replication both maintains the data and keeps a record of data relationships for reimplementation.
