The financial services industry is going full throttle on digital transformation, with Salesforce at the wheel. But with great tech comes great responsibility. How do you protect all that data? What happens when things go sideways? This is where DORA enters, the EU’s answer to digital resilience. It demands secure, recoverable, and auditable data. For Salesforce users, that’s a tall order.
That’s where solutions like DataArchiva come in, helping you stay compliant, boost resilience, and keep data governance tight.
DORA Requirements for Data Protection in Salesforce
DORA lays out clear expectations for how financial institutions should manage and protect their data, especially when leveraging platforms like Salesforce. Key data protection requirements include:
- Independent and Segregated Backups: Backups must be securely stored outside the production environment to prevent single points of failure.
- Rapid Recovery & Data Retention: Institutions must define and meet Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) for critical business functions.
- Risk Mitigation for ICT Providers: Organizations must understand and manage dependencies on ICT vendors, ensuring that third-party services do not introduce unacceptable risk.
- Data Integrity, Confidentiality & Availability: DORA calls for strict controls to ensure data remains trustworthy, protected from unauthorized access, and accessible when needed.
Challenges Financial Institutions Face with Salesforce Data
While Salesforce provides powerful CRM capabilities, financial institutions often struggle to meet regulatory and operational requirements due to:
Massive Data Volumes: Large amounts of customer, transactional, and historical data create storage overhead and increase the risk of performance issues.
Over-Reliance on Native Tools: Native Salesforce backup options are limited in scope and flexibility, making it difficult to meet recovery time and data segregation requirements.
Improve Productivity, Data Security, Compliance & ROI With Data Archiving & Backup for Salesforce
Building a Resilient and Compliant Salesforce Data Strategy for Financial Institutions
To stay resilient and compliant, especially under frameworks like the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), financial institutions need to approach their Salesforce data strategy across four core areas: Secure, Archive, Recover, and Accelerate.
Secure: Lock Down Sensitive Data
The foundation of any strong data strategy is security. This starts with understanding who has access to what within Salesforce. Permissions at both direct and inherited must be configured carefully to prevent unauthorized access. It’s equally important to eliminate unnecessary or redundant data fields that may expose sensitive information.
By identifying risks early and addressing them proactively, financial institutions can strengthen their security posture and keep their data protected from internal and external threats.
Archive: Make Compliance Easier
Archiving isn’t just about clearing out old records, it’s a key component of regulatory compliance and operational efficiency. Custom retention policies and built-in reporting tools help meet governance requirements while simplifying internal audits and regulatory reviews.
A clean, well-organized archive allows teams to retrieve information quickly when needed, supporting both legal inquiries and historical data analysis without cluttering production environments.
Recover: Be Ready for Anything
Backups are your safety net, but not all backups are created equal. Under DORA, institutions must establish and meet specific Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs), which define how quickly systems must recover and how much data loss is acceptable.
To meet these demands, your backup solution should include:
- Automated, frequent backups of both data and metadata
- Backup copies are stored securely outside your live Salesforce instance
- Fast, stress-free recovery with the flexibility to restore anything from a single record to an entire object
Time-stamped data snapshots are also valuable, enabling rollback after a faulty deployment or supporting AI model training with historical data.
Accelerate: Innovate Without Risk
Financial institutions are under constant pressure to innovate, but that innovation can’t come at the expense of security. Using masked, sanitized data in development and test environments protects sensitive customer information while allowing teams to iterate quickly and safely.
By seeding realistic, anonymized data into sandboxes, development and testing cycles can be accelerated, enabling faster delivery of new features and services without exposing live customer data.
A US Financial Services Provider Took Preventive Steps to Save Salesforce Data Storage with DataArchiva
How Backup & Archiving Support DORA Compliance
- Automated, Regular Backups: Ensure consistent protection of both data and metadata, minimizing data loss in case of disruption.
- Secure, Off-Platform Storage: Isolating backup storage from production environments helps prevent cascading failures.
- Granular Recovery Capabilities: Quick, precise restoration options reduce downtime and mitigate business impact.
- Long-Term Data Retention: Archiving supports audits, legal reviews, and historical analysis without burdening live systems.
DataArchiva: Empowering DORA Compliance in Salesforce
Automated Backup & Recovery
Comprehensive Coverage: Supports full, incremental, and metadata backups to ensure every aspect of your Salesforce org is captured.
Flexible Storage Options: Store backups in external cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, GCP, or on-premise systems to meet data residency and segregation mandates.
Advanced Data Archiving
Compliance and Security Features
- Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Limit access to sensitive archived and backup data, ensuring only authorized users can interact with it.
- Comprehensive Audit Trails: Maintain a detailed log of data access, changes, and user activity to support transparency and compliance audits.
- Data Minimization: Identify and retain only essential data to reduce risk, lower storage costs, and align with principles like GDPR and DORA.
Operational & Strategic Benefits for Financial Institutions
By integrating DataArchiva with Salesforce, financial services firms can unlock both compliance and business benefits:
- Boost Operational Resilience: Be better prepared for ICT-related incidents with instant access to critical data and robust recovery plans.
- Achieve Regulatory Compliance: Meet and exceed DORA’s mandates for data segregation, integrity, access control, and risk management.
- Reduce Costs: Offload inactive or historical data from Salesforce to reduce storage costs and avoid overage fees.
- Improve Data Visibility & Governance: Get centralized control over archived and backed-up data, ensuring consistency and traceability across the data lifecycle.
Conclusion
As digital threats grow and regulations like DORA become standard, financial institutions must prioritize resilience, transparency, and control in their data strategy. Salesforce is too critical to leave exposed, and native tools alone are often not enough.
DataArchiva provides a complete solution to secure, archive, and recover Salesforce data, helping financial organizations not only comply with DORA but also strengthen their long-term digital posture.
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