Achieving Regulatory Compliance for Salesforce Data: How to Build a Long-term Data Retention Strategy in Salesforce?

Standing so close to financial year-end did your long-term data retention strategy in Salesforce change from a compliance standpoint? 

Or, for Salesforce how far have we succeeded in mending the gap between opportunity & solution to right the data ‌compliance? 

With “Ethical Use of AI” riding the trends, Salesforce users are in an immediacy to mature their enterprise data governance holistically. The prime reason is the regulatory guidelines for the retention of PI are going ‌to the root practices for ethical practices of AI. 

However, as enterprises continue to struggle to automate the ABCs of Salesforce data management best practices (Archive, Backup & Cloud Connectivity), meeting compliance regulations can be a challenge. 

Currently, data privacy and safety are hot topics in the market and every individual wants his information to be thoroughly secured at all times. Irrespective of the industrial background, all companies ultimately deal with some or the other form of sensitive user data assets, which require constant protection. It’s no wonder that creating and enforcing a robust data retention policy is the need of the time. 

What is a Data Retention Policy And Ways to Comply

A company’s data retention program (be it for a cloud platform or Salesforce) ensures compliance with compliance laws and regulations while preserving data for operational use. As far as a data retention policy is concerned, then Wikipedia defines it as follows:

“A data retention policy is a recognized and proven protocol within an organization for retaining information for operational use while ensuring adherence to the laws and regulations concerning them. The objectives of a data retention policy are to keep important information for future use or reference, to organize information so it can be searched and accessed at a later date and to dispose of information that is no longer needed.”

Therefore, a company’s long-term data retention policy is essentially a set of guidelines that answers these three questions:

• What data will be retained? (It could be PI, PII or for compliance data like financial transactions, if it’s for Salesforce)
• How long the data needs to be retained, and what will happen after it is no longer needed

It also includes organizing documents like email attachments, contract documents, and bills stored in Salesforce, to facilitate their easy search and access and fit ‌the company’s compliance postures.

Therefore to fortify the compliance structure for CRM data, customer-facing organizations can integrate Salesforce with third-party tools such as compliance monitoring systems and risk assessment platforms. 

To meet ‌data retention ‌compliance in Salesforce, companies that closely adhere to data laws; archiving solutions for long-term data retention help to arrange, manage, access and edit CRM data when complying with regulatory conformance. 

If you belong to a government agency, this data archiving success story will help you understand how Salesforce architects can efficiently meet stringent compliance needs with long-term data retention, with DataArchiva.

Objective of Long-Term Data Retention For Compliance

There can be several different reasons behind an organization looking to retain their data, whether it is to comply or to overcome site-wide data losses. Some of the major reasons have been explained below: 

• Internal Business Processes– In most cases, the CRM application is capable of processing and managing the vast amount of data generated by business processes. To build trust and confidence with your customers, having a robust data retention policy is explicitly needed to ensure the accessibility of the data in both the organization’s base-level storage as well as archived storage, as and when the need arises.
• Litigation– Data retention policies come in handy for organizations if they set pre-mapped controls to be bound by legal agreements and contracts. This helps to protect their data in cloud CRMs like Salesforce in safekeeping documents for future litigation. This retention can either be for a specified period or for the duration of the contract. 
  
• Data Availability – The objective of long-term data retention for compliance is rooted in ensuring sustained and accessible data availability. In compliance-driven environments, it is essential to maintain comprehensive records over extended periods to meet regulatory requirements, audits, and legal mandates. This urges companies to adopt more efficient data archiving practices that respond to the complex data structure of CRMs ensuring data integrity as well as availability to address risk management faster.
  
  
• Efficient Reporting –Like long-term data retention facilitates ready availability of historical information. Archiving historical data and documents marks a solid foundation for a valuable repository that helps in efficient reporting on CRM data for historical evaluation of customer lifecycle.
  
  
• Aligning to ‘Rights of Data Subjects’  – Aligning to the rights of data subjects in the context of long-term data retention for GDPR compliance involves ensuring that the storage and management of retained data respect and uphold the privacy rights and preferences of individuals whose data is stored. This includes the right to access, rectify, and delete personal data, as well as the right to know how their information is being processed. By aligning with these rights, long-term data retention practices aim to foster transparency, accountability, and trust between organizations and the individuals whose data they retain. 

Here are top 6 Considerations in Compliance Management While Archiving Salesforce Data

Regulatory Compliance in Salesforce

Wikipedia defines regulatory compliance as,

“Regulatory compliance describes the goal that organizations aspire to achieve in their efforts to ensure that they are aware of and take steps to comply with relevant laws, policies, and regulations.” 

In simpler terms, regulatory compliance in Salesforce helps to strike a balance between data governance and compliance, fostering a secure and accountable data management ecosystem within the Salesforce CRM platform.

‌Therefore data archiving solutions in Salesforce like DataaArchiva help to create relevance to its business processes, violations of which often result in legal punishment, including hefty federal fines. 

Some prominent regulatory compliance laws and regulations include the Dodd-Frank Act, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

There are various key benefits when organizations using Salesforce can comply with industry standards:

• Upon compliance with industry standards, an organization can drastically improve the functioning of Salesforce systems and operations making it more streamlined.
  
  
• Complying with regulations expands the organization’s credibility and legitimacy, reinforcing cloud trust and ensuring positive reputation among employees, customers, and the general public.
  
  
• Following regulatory compliance in Salesforce also boosts data awareness. Each stakeholder acts like a groomed data steward who understands data governance initiatives and knows how to use the right tools or practices to prevent enterprises from tripping over compliance fines.

Refer to this blog to build your data retention strategy in Salesforce to enforce policies the right way.

Future-Proof Long-term Data Retention Strategy for Compliance

When we talk about the relationship between data retention and regulatory compliance, we first need to discuss ‌instances when increasing demand for data privacy clashes with the demands for extended record-keeping.

Two especially problematic instances have been discussed below:

• Data Retention Based On Dynamic Compliance Requirements– Oftentimes, the compliance regulations binding the company to retain data for long periods within the Salesforce cloud, which can be cost-intensive and comply with other data privacy regulations that impose strict limits on how businesses gather and store personally identifiable data. In other words, the new laws that demand longer data retention create some real difficulties.
  
  
• The “Right to Be Forgotten” Rule – Even when certain data privacy laws like CAN-SPAM Act (Art.ref) or GDPR (Art. 17) discuss the Right to erasure; give people the ‘right to be forgotten’ (organizations must destroy all personal data about an individual upon his request), their implementation becomes difficult as it runs counter to other regulations needed for maintaining compliance. In other words, the security that comes from compliance with industry regulations can seem contrary to maintaining user privacy.

Even after the above-mentioned problems are taken into account, a robust data retention policy is extremely necessary for an organization. Innumerable organizations around the globe have a data retention policy in Salesforce to comply with both their internal policies like governance limits  as well as government or industry regulations. When stringent data retention policies are being implemented for various compliance reasons, it is also important to acknowledge the role data archiving plays for long-term data storage & management.

With data archival, it is important to ensure that the policy properly creates a comprehensive data archive in cheaper storage and ensures easy search and accessibility. Here we introduce two applications from our data management suite that can help Salesforce users. 

First is the #1 AppExchange data management application called DataArchiva which can not only help in retaining the data for longer periods but also helps in reducing the storage costs and optimizing the CRM performance. 

DataArchiva is a flawless digital application that archives unused Salesforce data at a native level in ‌a data-based storage system called Salesforce Big Objects. This compliance-ready, user-friendly, and highly scalable application can also manage a large volume of data without any hassle. DataArchiva can help get 80% of Salesforce ROI, by reducing data storage costs and by increasing Salesforce Performance.  For more information, you can get in touch with us or request a demo here.  

Watch how the app works.

DataArchiva’s External Cloud archiving solution is also a great choice for a long-term data retention strategy in Salesforce. It allows bulk archiving of data from Salesforce with no data governance limits. Using DataArchiva you can set any cloud platform of your choice to archive your Salesforce data to a data base of your choice 

With our DataArchiva Backup which is a robust Salesforce data backup and recovery solution you can custom-design to offer both full and incremental backup services along with a seamless restoration feature. With DataBakup, Salesforce customers can get rid of their fears associated with losing critical business data as it not only safeguards the data but also ensures its security within the cloud infrastructure. For more information about this highly scalable and cost-effective solution, you can get in touch with us or request a demo here.