Top 6 Compliance Management Considerations While Archiving Salesforce Data

As you prepare for 2023, beware of the compliance strictures. 

It speaks directly to organizations belonging to the compliance-driven brackets, where data sensitivity drives the data protection clause. Their practicing compliance is critical best to avoid privacy breaches and data writing that violates the backup retention rules.

And the trouble trebles when you start aging on your data. 

Imagine that you are running a B2B finance firm with multiple revenue cycle operations managed at your Salesforce org, connecting you across all digital capacities. This includes the entire front-end revenue cycle and its outcomes, overseeing revenue policies and procedures, counting billing charts for revenue generation. And, each of these business channels handles tons of data to cater to the operational needs, accumulating TBs data fated to sit at your primary storage; idle, open to rummage & unmanaged. 

Then you have compliance to catch you on tenterhooks with their demands like – 

Do you have a data retention policy in place? If you are archiving your customer data is it retained as per GDPR guidelines? What’s the guarantee that you can produce your archived data on the cause? Most importantly, ARE YOUR DATA SECURE?

Even before you smell the danger, you would have stepped on the thin ice. 

Henceforth, to avoid pitfalls, it’s time to get a rock-solid compliance framework to keep perils at bay. If you are starting from scratch, you might need to hammer on a little longer to peg on compliance management for your organization and you may need to walk a few miles extra when it comes to archiving your Salesforce data.

Let’s shake off the bout of compliance jitters and prepare to welcome the elephant in the boardroom – with a style. 

Here are 6 crisp compliance tips to introduce your Salesforce data with best archiving practices. 

Tip 1: Configuring as Per Long-Term Data Retention Policies 

Before you start with compliance profiling, it’s very important to identify which Salesforce object fits the purpose of archiving. This decides the fate of the data, whether to be archived or disposed of. If archived, for how long?

The retention period can be three years or six years and is mostly dictated as per the compliance truce. However, different data has different retention periods and the decisions are concluded based on both industry regulations and in alignment with government legislation.

In order to be in accordance you need to know what regulatory compliance falls on your radar. We listed the most common of them all. 

• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Article 5e: The very first criterion is to preserve personal data lawfully, supporting notions like
  

• • Purpose limitation – Archiving is permitted only to carry out scientific, historical research, or statistical purposes on public interest
  • Data minimization– Retaining only what’s relevant
  • Data accuracy – Archived records should be error-proofed at the earliest
  • Storage Limitation – Subject data is to be retained only upon the laws of rights and freedom
  • Integrity and confidentiality – For being data responsible
  • Accountability – Controller responsibility for compliant demands

To dig deeper you can refer to the GDPR principles to internalize the data retention norms better.

• Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA): Speaks directly to organizations holding on HIPAA-associated data records. Mostly the requirements are enclosed under demands like patient authorizations, employee section policies, Access logs, and a few more data retention limitations and each clause should be carefully met if imposed.
• Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA): Imposed by the law suite of the U.S. Department of Labor, for protective recordkeeping for individuals, families, or households of domestic service workers. Unlike other data protection laws, it’s vocal about its compliance data-keeping format. It prescribes a sample timekeeping format; DAY-DATE-IN-OUT-TOTAL HOURS.
• Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) Compliance: Poses criminal penalties upon tampering with corporate audit records. It sprung into action after the ENRON scandal that wiped an entire financial enterprise of existence. It’s known to fine heavily on acts of data destruction, alteration, or falsification of records demanded by federal investigations and bankruptcy.
• California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA): Levied in 2018 with the intention to preserve consumer right to personal information during any B2C communes. For businesses collecting consumer information on purpose, CCPA elaborates a regulatory protocol concluding –
• The right to know about what the business collects
• The right to delete personal information on request
• The right to opt-out to having their personal information to be sold out
• The right to non-discrimination to levy the CCPA rights on personal information.
  

This is only a short memorandum on how demanding and aggressive law suites are about data retention requirements. The regulations are only to get tighter with time and it’s high time to get mindful of how you process or archive your data. 

On the flip side, a number of data governance structures are revised each year; creating new requirements for businesses to follow up with. Addressed as ‘New Areas of Risks’, the compliance controllers are pushing new formalities to meet security extensions. 

Speaking of Salesforce, it’s not just a popular CRM, it’s an asset to the US Federal government in cloud-enablement for operational needs. Making it the safe harbor for data to be. The suggestion is to ‘go native’ with Salesforce-owned silos like BigObject when at Salesforce. As a premium ISV partner of Salesforce, DataArchiva has been meeting the compliance demands in data archiving for Salesforce Architects/IT Heads/CTO  in charge, helping them to manage access to BigObjects or even external archiving instances. 

Bookmark: DataArchiva at AppExchange so that you can visit later as you read further.

We promised you six compliance tips, so here is the next. 

Tip 2: Owning Managed Archive Locations 

Compliance Archiving in Salesforce – count it under mission critical mandate this coming year. As a Salesforce admin, most of your data traffic is about customer handling. Upon long-term use, it quite likes to gather data. Eventually, your traffic-heavy instances and overcrowded storage is slowing down the call-out functions in Salesforce, delaying client response time and eating up on your productivity. 

Let’s say you want to trim off the overgrowth and you approached a Salesforce consulting firm to achieve it. Other than comparing only the price points look out for

• Storage ownerships policies  
• 3rd-party data storage accessibility 
• Authentication of the archival storage spaces
  

– when moving out your Salesforce data from your production instance. It’s safe to get hands-on with BigObjects instead, otherwise, make sure the data is destined for authorized storage, owned & managed by you. If you choose to archive with DataArchiva, archiving Salesforce data with BigObjects comes innate with the product, to know more you can visit us at – dataarchiva.com.

Tip 3: Allowing Seamless Accessibility

There is an old saying – What’s Seen is Sold. You can closely recall the same while archiving. Let’s say moving the data to its desired archive location was a success and as the data is no longer active you never bothered to revisit it. For any force majeure clause, you want an immediate download of the data, and then trouble creeps. You have to look up the credentials, access them from the cloud, endless ponder over credentials, and you are finally there. 

This makes it extremely critical to have your data access handy, right in the Salesforce app. An additional storage management API is one of the best ways to keep a tap, whether your data is archived in internal storage like BigObjects or a 3rd-party storage space like external databases including Postgres, Redshift, MySQL, Oracle, and MS SQL. 

If you are using DataArchiva to archive your salesforce data, you get to enjoy storage visibility and control who can access, use or view your archived data. One of our customers from the Travel & Hospitality industry addressed and mentioned DataArchiva, telling us that – “Everything is visible and accessible without their ‘cheese’ being moved“. Making DataArchiva a compliant-friendly and accessible connector for your Salesforce org. 

Tip 4: Ability to Restore 

If you’re moving your data outside the Salesforce instance make sure you can bring back the same status from your archival destination whenever required. And the process is not as simple as it is explained above. In order to bring your archived data back to a live instance, you have to have a solid backend interface for data mapping transformations. These interfaces are called data mapping bridges that help to seam the format difference between the two systems to return the archive data to its original destination structure. 

This serves compliance needs and is strongly recommended when you maintain archives as per the stated data retention method. DataArchiva also has a restoration menu for its archival systems, ensuring data mapping by preserving the conceptual schema of the object data. DataArchiva backs up the data in the same format by maintaining all the complex object relationships & any level of data hierarchy while restoring data back to your live environment. 

Tip 5: Maintained Data Integrity 

Conceptual data mapping is beyond the scope of being only an archival data restoration. While transferring the data from the Salesforce instance to the archival destination, the process has to follow similar disciplines. Maintaining the object data schema is heavily compliance-bound. As mentioned earlier, data retention laws like FLSA ask to be as specific as keeping the data in a timekeeping format. Hence, moving data from Salesforce requires you to respond to integrity maintenance, where objects’ contents are not distorted from the source business or technical metadata along with the metadata structure.

As a compliant first application, DataArchiva allows metadata sync, which helps the archival engine so that we are not losing the data integrity so that complex object relationships are maintained after archiving. It’s a one-of-a-kind Salesforce archiving solution that can protect object data and its relationship at any level of data hierarchy making it a go-to for the Salesforce admins to allow data archiving with the purpose of compliance management.

Tip 6: Right To Be Forgotten (RTBF)

The infamous data erasure obligation is issued under GDPR data protection laws. It explains that organizations cannot retain your personal data against your free will. Upon the customer’s request to have the record removed, the retained data should be erased immediately from all the organization’s owned storage spaces. It holds true even when the data subject has withdrawn his/her consent for processing the data. Violation of this law can lead to severe consequences, hence requiring tight compliance management to ensure the customer data rights are respected. 

A GDPR-protected Salesforce org assures brand loyalty. It builds trust and naturally builds up your ROI with better repeat customer rates. Where most archiving solutions lag, DataArchiva excels in keeping its application GDPR compliant. As it allows seamless data access to your archived records, it also allows you to perform the erasure procedure right at your Salesforce org. Implementing DataArchiva allows the processing of customer requests faster, keeping the processes lighter with zero glitches. 

You can do more with DataArchiva. A few of them are encrypted archiving, and purging, followed by many more managed features to get you going. If you are planning to make a move towards complete compliance portfolio management of your Salesforce CRM data, be an early bird and request a product demo for DataArchiva at the earliest!