Salesforce announced the discontinuation of its Data Recovery Service effective July 31, 2020. Where does that leave Salesforce customers? And what happened to shared responsibility? A few short months ago, we would have all freaked out feeling that Salesforce has abandoned us. But not today.
To all Salesforce administrators out there, “We’ve got your back.” Literally. I mean, we’ve got your backup and recovery. AutoRABIT Vault™ delivers data protection, recovery, and compliance explicitly designed for the Salesforce environment.
However, let’s start at the beginning. Salesforce announced via Knowledge Article Number: 000352139 that Salesforce is discontinuing its support for the Salesforce Recovery service. Excerpt from the article: “Effective July 31, 2020, Data Recovery as a paid feature will be deprecated and no longer available as a service. The Data Recovery service, formally known as Data Restoration, is a legacy process which was used as a last resort, where Salesforce can potentially recover your data at a specific point in time in case it has been permanently deleted or mangled during a data import. Data Recovery was formerly known as ‘Data Restoration.”
This is a big deal. Countless administrators (particularly me, during my short stint as a solo administrator at a previous startup company) have had to look up to the skies and say, “thank you Lord” because they could count on Salesforce to deliver recovery files. Although, the ten thousand dollars somewhat tempered that feeling of gratitude that Salesforce charged. This service is now going away. It is essential to understand what that service offering is that it will no longer be available after July 31. Customer data will no longer be protected. This action now shifts the previously shared responsibility for data protection and compliance solely to the customer.
The Data recovery service is provided by Salesforce Support as a fee-based service to recover data at a specific point in time. That recovery point must be within three months from the current date. The fee for each file recovery request is $10,000. All the data is delivered in .csv files. There is usually a 6-8 week waiting period for the fulfillment to be completed. These files, being flat files, are not able to maintain parent-child data hierarchy relationships. The Salesforce service does not restore metadata.
Data restoration involves reconstituting or stitching all the files together so that data relationships are kept intact. Data restoration can be a very long, complex, and tedious effort. In most cases, it requires professional services consulting with a firm that has data expertise. Once all the costs are tallied, the ten thousand dollars paid to recover the file may not seem too significant.
To meet company IT governance and industry-specific compliance requirements, organizations need to use a robust backup and recovery solution to protect their data as well as maintain the integrity of their business operations. To that end, Salesforce advises customers to use a third-party backup and recovery solution.
Options for selecting a backup and recovery solution for Salesforce are:
- On-premise enterprise storage
- General purpose cloud backup solutions
- Backup and Recovery purpose-built for Salesforce
On-premise backup and recovery solutions managed by IT may be available in the enterprise. However, backing up Salesforce data to on-premise storage can be slow and unwieldy.
General-purpose cloud backup solutions do not provide an effective way of maintaining the multi-level parent-child relationships found in layered hierarchies of Salesforce data. Additionally, a real glaring deficiency is the inability to manage metadata.
AutoRABIT provides Enterprise-Class Cloud Backup and Recovery for Salesforce
AutoRABIT Vault™ is a cloud-based solution that delivers the ability to backup and instantly recover data, metadata, attachments, chatter feeds, knowledge articles, and all the rich content to reinstate the complete Salesforce experience. It also maintains hierarchical data integrity.
Key reasons to select Vault:
- It’s the Most Robust and Dependable Backup & Recovery Solution Built for Salesforce – Designed by the leading DevOps provider for Salesforce, AutoRABIT. It has applied experience from completing hundreds of deployments and data migrations to deliver a reliable, dependable, and robust backup and recovery tool.
- Ability to Backup and Recover What’s Most Important to Salesforce – Backup and instantly recover, data, metadata, file attachments, chatter feeds, knowledge articles, and all the rich content to reinstate the complete Salesforce experience.
Meets IT and Regulatory Compliance Needs – Meet IT policy and regulatory requirements and industry-specific compliance. With Vault, your backup intervals can be as frequent as every five minutes. As a cloud-based backup and recovery solution, Vault delivers the fastest recovery time in the industry.
Where do you go from here?
It is vital to remember that most organizations are going to need to arrange their own backup and recovery solutions. Relying on Salesforce Data Recovery is no longer an option. Now is the right time for the Salesforce Admin Team, IT Audit and Compliance, as well as Business Continuity Planning and Disaster Recovery Managers to meet to validate data protection, security and compliance needs of the company. It is also the time to evaluate and recognize the impact of data loss as it applies to the operation of the Salesforce instances.
Start the process now to select an enterprise backup and recovery solution that meets the needs of the organization and is also ideal for the way that Salesforce operates. AutoRABIT is available to provide more information and expertise in this area.
Contact us for a demo or more information.