In today’s rapidly progressing world, data is the oil which keeps the engine of an organization up and running. With the influx of technology in every sector, the global volume of data is growing at an astonishing & increasingly rapid pace. According to a recent study by the World Economic Forum, it is estimated that by 2025, nearly 463 exabytes of data will be created each day.
Such massive volumes of data is essential in delivering top-grade services to customers which is why most enterprises across the globe leverage CRM platforms, like Salesforce, to process this data better. Salesforce plays a key role in optimizing the growth & success of an organization. But as the Salesforce data volume grows exponentially, efficient Salesforce data management not only increases in importance but becomes extremely tedious as well.
When thinking of effective Salesforce data management strategies, most organizations become confused between data backup & the new-age data archiving. Though often used interchangeably, there is a huge difference between them. You can read about the difference between Backup & Archiving before choosing what mechanism suits your needs.
What exactly is Salesforce Data Archiving?
To simply define, Salesforce data archiving essentially involves migrating the outdated historical Salesforce data, that which is not accessed regularly, from active production level to some long-term, cold archival storage. The Salesforce archival data especially consists of older, legacy data that, though not used frequently, remains important to the organization or must be retained for some future reference or to meet different regulatory compliance reasons.
Being the key to managing Salesforce data effectively, Salesforce data archiving has multiple advantages that must be discussed. The greatest benefit of archiving data is that it drastically reduces the cost of primary data storage. More specifically, the various other advantages of Salesforce data archiving are mentioned below:
- Reduced recurrent storage costs– As data is archived outside the primary storage, it cuts back the need to purchase additional storage from Salesforce & prevents the organization from a seriously hefty investment. By easily managing the data in the already-allocated storage, the operational costs are also reduced.
- Prevention of data loss & increased security– As the archived data cannot be modified, it prevents any accidental changes from being made and also prevents the archived data from being lost. Since important data is removed from the active database, it also limits the threats of cyberattacks & malware threats.
- Improved regulatory compliance– The built-in policies & data archiving best practices ensure that the data records are stored for an appropriate amount of time in order to properly adhere to all data retention & compliance guidelines.
- Enhanced productivity & higher growth– As admins spend less time & effort in maintaining and managing the Salesforce records, the overall user productivity is enhanced greatly after archiving the inactive Salesforce data, thereby leading to greater business growth as well.
- Better & Faster Development & Integrations in the Org– When inactive data is moved out of the production level through data archiving, it in turn reduces the size of the Org (which was previously heavy due to more volume of data). This facilitates easier & faster development of the Org as well as allows more third-party apps to be integrated into the Org.
Top 3 indicators you need Data Archiving
Now that you are aware of the various benefits of Salesforce data archiving as means for efficient data management in Salesforce, the next important factor is understanding when your organization is in need of data archiving. As archiving redundant Salesforce data is a big decision that requires a lot of deliberation, the admins must be on the lookout for some serious indicators that stipulate that the organization is in dire need of implementing comprehensive Salesforce data archiving strategies.
Steady Degradation of CRM performance
The primary indicator that it’s time to implement Salesforce data archiving strategies in the Org is the constantly diminishing performance of the Salesforce application. When there is a massive volume of data in the primary data storage, it results in longer data processing time and even longer run-times for queries and reports. Even the other administrative tasks like database reorganization, Salesforce data backup & recovery, system upgrades, etc take a very long time.
All this causes the performance of the Salesforce CRM to drastically slow down which in turn leads to disruption of different ongoing business processes. It’s important to understand that a smaller amount of data in the active database not only improves the performance of transactions, queries & reports, but it also allows them to be completed in a shorter time. This is when Salesforce admins should implement strategies for data archiving to improve the CRM’s performance.
Also read: Slow Salesforce App Performance – Is your data growth the real culprit?
Difficulty in Managing Salesforce Data
Another important factor to look out for in your Salesforce Org is the ease with which Salesforce data is managed within the primary allotted data storage space. As more and more data starts piling up in the storage, not only the performance degrades but there are noticeable difficulties in efficient Salesforce data management also. These include increasing storage costs, depleting primary storage space, and most importantly the need to purchase additional data storage (extremely costly option).
With the data being constantly generated from multiple different sources, these difficulties keep on escalating with time, making data management even more difficult. Therefore, when it becomes apparent that effective Salesforce data management is not possible in the allocated data storage, admins must implement proper data archiving strategies in their Org that help in overcoming all difficulties & provide a seamless data management experience.
Unable to Retain Data for Regulatory Compliance
Usually the industry-specific internal & external Salesforce data retention & regulatory compliance regulations require organizations to retain relevant data for different audit reasons and prevent it from modification or premature deletion. If your primary storage space is becoming insufficient for retaining Salesforce data for the time period mandated by the compliance guidelines governing your industry, then this is another major indicator that you need to archive your infrequently used data.
With the rarely-used data safely archived in an external storage, enterprises can adhere to the data retention & compliance directives in a better manner as the archived data will be retained in the external storage for longer periods of time, without hampering the business growth. Therefore when proper data archiving strategies are implemented, admins have more control over their legacy data and can guarantee its availability and authenticity.
We hope, with this article, we were able to explain to you some of the important indicators that your organization is in need of implementing efficient Salesforce data archiving techniques for an optimized Salesforce data management experience. To help you even further, our enterprise-grade Salesforce data archival applications, DataArchiva & DataConnectiva, are also at your disposal.
While DataArchiva archives the Salesforce data into the native Salesforce Big Objects, the ONLY data archival application to do so, DataConnectiva allows the data to be archived into different external databases like Postgres, Redshift, MS SQL, Oracle & MySQL by leveraging cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, GCP & Heroku. Both our applications guarantee significant improvement in the Salesforce CRM performance (nearly 2X), better data management, simplified data retention & compliance as well as drastic reduction in data storage costs (80-90%). To know more, schedule a free demo today.
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