10 Reasons Why You Need a Salesforce Backup

Article at a glance

• Human errors, insider threats, and integration issues can lead to accidental or intentional data loss.

Salesforce, as a leading Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform with over 150,000 customers, contains a large amount of mission-critical data for businesses. However, this data is not immune to loss or corruption. Given that Salesforce recommends using third-party cloud backup solutions, it is the responsibility of administrators to ensure that their organizational Salesforce data is backed up regularly. Here are twelve more reasons why you need a Salesforce backup.

Accidental deletion is a common cause of data loss. A study conducted by Inventio IT reveals that a significant 33% of data loss incidents in businesses are attributed to human error. The same study indicates that 61% of businesses surveyed have suffered data loss due to human error in the past year. 

Scenario: A Sales representative accidentally deletes a critical Opportunity record associated with a high-value Account in Salesforce. This could lead to significant revenue loss and negatively impact your customer relationships. With a backup solution in place, you can quickly restore the deleted Opportunity record, minimizing disruption to your business operations.  

Malicious insiders are usually disgruntled employees who intentionally misuse their access for revenge, financial gain, or both. According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2023, data breaches caused by malicious insiders were found to be the most expensive, costing around USD 4.9 million! 

Scenario: Suppose a disgruntled employee intentionally deletes several Contact records from Salesforce before leaving the company. This could disrupt your Sales and Marketing efforts. Having a backup solution would allow you to restore these Contact records swiftly, ensuring business continuity.  

Scenario: Let's say a computer virus corrupts the data in your Salesforce Account records, making them unreadable. This could severely affect your ability to serve your customers effectively. A backup solution would allow you to restore the corrupted Account records from a previous backup, ensuring minimal disruption to your business operations.  

Scenario: Imagine a third-party application integrated with your Salesforce instance malfunctions and deletes several Case records. This could disrupt your customer service operations. Having a backup solution would allow you to restore the deleted Case records quickly, ensuring uninterrupted customer service.  

A few years back, Salesforce users suffered an incident that later came to be known as ‘Permageddon.’ Salesforce teams that had integrated Pardot, a marketing automation tool, found that their permissions models were corrupted and that all users were granted permission to modify all organization data. As a result, Salesforce had to block access to its entire database for about 15 hours. Businesses affected by the outage lost precious time and critical Salesforce data, all of which could have been avoided if they had a backup solution in place.   

Scenario: Consider a real estate agency that relies on Salesforce for tracking property listings, client interactions, and sales progress. During an unexpected Salesforce outage, they lose access to their database, leaving agents unable to retrieve property details and client contacts or update ongoing negotiations. This results in missed opportunities and a significant slowdown in their sales process. If the agency had a backup solution, they could have continued accessing their critical data, keeping their operations smooth and preventing potential losses in sales and client trust. 

Scenario: Your industry requires you to retain data for a certain period for legal compliance, but you need to free up Salesforce storage space. A third-party cloud backup solution allows you to back up data to the cloud, enabling you to delete old data from Salesforce while remaining compliant with data retention policies.  

Scenario: You lose some Opportunity records, but Salesforce's data recovery service takes too long or fails to recover the data. A cloud backup solution can quickly and accurately restore lost Opportunity records, minimizing downtime and avoiding the hefty recovery fee.  

Scenario: Your Salesforce data storage limit is reached, and you need to free up space without losing data. With a third-party cloud backup tool, you can back up data to the cloud, enabling you to delete data from Salesforce and free up storage space, while ensuring no data loss.  

 In 2019, Hanna Andersson, a children's clothing company operating on a cloud-based e-commerce platform, experienced a data breach through a malware attack on Salesforce. This incident led to the exposure of a significant amount of customer data, including credit card details and personal identifiers. The breach affected approximately 10,000 consumers across the country. 

Salesforce schedules systematic maintenance windows to continuously enhance their application for customers. During the maintenance, a major chunk of organization data becomes unavailable to use. Having a backup serves as a bulwark against such scheduled or sudden maintenance so that your business continuity is not affected. 

Scenario: Imagine you lose access to your Contact records during Salesforce maintenance, due to which the sales team is unable to view client contact details for scheduled meetings. This leads to missed meetings and a potential loss of client trust. With a backup solution, the team could have accessed the Contact records from the backup. 

With SysCloud’s intelligent backup solution, administrators can effortlessly back up all standard and custom objects, metadata, and Apex triggers., and easily export all Salesforce objects as .csv or .xlsx files. Admins can also quickly restore data from any point-in-time backup snapshot with object relationships intact. 

Learn more about SysCloud backup for Salesforce