When I’m talking with customers there are a number of areas that they ask for advice on, one is about which Apps on the Salesforce AppExchange they should look into. Being a techie geek I like products like OwnBackup. Now backing up your data is never going to be the most exciting thing in the world, but it is essential. And this app has, at the time of writing this blog, backed up over 17 trillion records!
70% of data loss can be attributed to user errors
The people at OwnBackup have done a really good job on their system and how the use cases of a backup can be made. Fundamentally, as an admin, you want to back-up your data when you’re running either a global update or a data import/update – just in case…. And anyone who’s been in the CRM industry for a while will tell you, that with the best will, things go wrong.
The simplest use case is an on-demand backup. At the click of a button, I want to ensure my data is backed up now. By comparison, you’re looking at weekly backups from Salesforce as standard. The backup can also use their new ICE™ encryption based on blockchain to show that your data hasn’t been tampered with – great for proving validity in GDPR cases.
27% of data loss occurs due to overwriting of correct information with incorrect information
Taking this one step further, you now need to be able to compare your current data with a backup to see where the differences are. This could be deletions or worse data being overwritten so it “looks right” – think malicious employee. The system allows you to do searches within your backup and to provide comparisons between the two. This is a huge time saver.
Once you have the data you need to restore it. You can restore the entire dataset easily enough, but more often than not, it’s just not that simple. Ownbackup allows you to restore all or partial data. It’s also intelligent enough to do related restores i.e. if I restore an Account, it will restore related objects. This makes your recovery process much simpler and much faster than the standard offering.
This is all great for your production environment, but Ownbackup has been smart about this and designed the engine so that it’ll also restore to your sandbox and can seed your sandbox with data. This is great for partial copy sandboxes with small data limits, but you want real data to test on. As part of the process it can even anonymize your data to ensure compliance. It’ll also disable/enable triggers as required to ensure pesky emails aren’t sent out automatically to all your customers!
It’s a 5-star rating from me and I’d certainly look at budgets for 2019 to include it.
About the Author
Richard Young is Vice President, International, at Fonteva, the leading Association Software platform powered by Salesforce, offering an end-to-end strategy with a 360 degree view of all member activities.
With over 20 years in the CRM industry, Richard has a wealth of experience in vendor and buyer roles, covering all aspects of the CRM lifecycle, from pre-sales to sales, consultancy, and technology. In each of his roles, he has ensured the alignment of the strategic business goals with CRM and customer experience, both for his customers and the organizations he has worked with.
His trailblazing as a CRM thought leader dates back to the mid-90s when he helped pioneer the idea in the UK market. From DOS to Windows, and now in the cloud, Richard brings critical experience to help clients navigate their way through CRM projects and objectives.