Salesforce Data Storage Management Best Practices

Why is your reporting in Salesforce becoming slower? Like when you run a report it takes ages to fetch your data? Go to setup, click on the Storage Usage Page of your Salesforce org and check your current usage, impromptu!

Based on how many licensed users are there in your org (4800 users at max to an org unit., excluding exception), Salesforce allocates around 10 to 10.2 GB of storage space as per the edition in use. Compared to the number of reports you gather for each custom object, you might be falling short on the primary storage space and nearing the limit, slowing down your reporting speed at your Salesforce app.

The Salesforce CRM’s speed & performance begin to deteriorate when nearly 80-90% of the org space is filled with data. There is a fair chance of unburdening your storage load in Salesforce by record consolidations or removing redundancy. That might be true if there are few. If you have Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Financial Cloud, Health Cloud, plus hundred other custom solutions in place, it will overwhelm your Salesforce storage on a million scale.

Reversals don’t really work for Salesforce storage exploding on data. Therefore, you have to be optimal to stop running into the coveted cautionary: “Your Salesforce data storage limit exceeded”.

For more effective management of your Salesforce systems, here is our share of Salesforce data storage best practices tips to bank on this year 👇

1) Monitoring the Data Growth in Salesforce

And, we are not asserting a navigation guide on how to view your storage usage status with quick find, rather the goal is to identify a floor plan to devise a functional, data usage monitoring system for the top growth sources in your Salesforce org. For a heads-up here is how you can step up and traverse –

Initiating a data monitoring plan – If you are working with custom schema, check how often you are interacting with your new custom objects, custom fields, and relationships
Setting-up checkpoints – Revisiting your current data model with schema referencing laterals can be a great way to check if you are adding custom objects that already exist
Optimizing the data accumulation structure – Let’s say, your app data model getting a little to more complicated, you can always use handy optimizations to trim the schema based on the field size
Go-Live on evaluation – Depending on your current storage status and the data model in use start reporting your Salesforce org admins to update on your data growth in Salesforce.

2) Identifying The Objects Which Are Contributing More To Data Growth

After the initial monitoring cycle, you would be able to identify a generic data growth pattern, based on your Salesforce systems’ quarterly to biannual data accumulation. It’s the leads, tasks, emails, cases, or contacts that appear to be the most common sources of primary data growth, which runs out of storage limits faster than any other objects. If there are any expansion plans in-coming in your calendar, then it’s high time to think about alternatives to store your standard object records, if your organization is hesitant to remove them from Salesforce.

3) Determining The Compliance-Related Data Which Needs To Be Retained

Even if you are planning to move the data from Salesforce to a secure archive location, you need to be particular about a few things as standard practices for Salesforce data storage management like the purpose of having your Salesforce data archived and what are the underlying benefits too if other than unloading the data burden from the production instance. Mostly the unused Salesforce data fall into three categories and are archived as –

Compliance Archive – In order to meet the regulatory requirements
Historical Archive – In deriving business insights for future endeavors
Analytics Archive – In reporting and performance analytics

And each data record is stored under the prescribed format, mostly data archive for compliance retections where any act of data destruction, alteration, or falsification of records, found upon federal investigation is fined heavily.

4) Having a Modern Archiving Strategy

As per the data retention rules, the data holding period can vary based on the service industry and government legislation. Based on the retention period, for a year or years, the data storage plan should keep a relevant Salesforce data archival strategy. Retaining a compliance archive is cost-saving compared to purchasing an additional storage space in Salesforce, yet it’s a costly affair to retain archive spaces without proper purpose. Looking up industry guidelines and comparing standards can be a good starting point to get a considered approach for a fool-proof plan.

5) Deciding Where To Archive Salesforce Data

Let’s say, you are working for a federal government agency, your case objects are overpouring on Salesforce data, and would need to come up with Salesforce Data Storage Management sooner. So, what are your options? Being in the federal agency, you are again asked, not to move any data from the Salesforce Government Cloud partition. Is there any way out? Well yes.

Thanks to Salesforce for having a comprehensive, cloud-ready tool corner – AppExchange to troubleshoot its CRM limitations. And there you can find us, DataArchiva Native Archiving, the only archiving application for Salesforce that allows Salesforce data archiving into the Salesforce BigObjects. This application has a competitive edge over price points as well as usage for compliance archiving in Salesforce.

6) Leveraging External Cloud Platforms

Not all industries will look out for a cloud-native archiving system, what are the chances you can archive your customer Salesforce data to your existing databases? Applications like DataArchiva External Archiving can efficiently move your Salesforce data from primary storage to your enterprise databases like Postgres, Redshift, MySQL, Oracle, and MSSQL, by leveraging your own external Cloud (AWS, Azure, Heroku, GCP ) or On-premise platforms. This can be an efficient archive plan for businesses who are looking forward to historical archives or analytics archives, given the fact of security and better accessibility of archive data to call back to your current production environment in Salesforce.

You can accomplish a few extras when you archive your Salesforce data with DataArchiva. Some of them are encrypted archiving, purging, and many more Salesforce data storage management features that we consider as best practices, Request a product demo for DataArchiva if you intend to move toward full compliance portfolio management of your Salesforce CRM data.