Salesforce Data Archiving

What is Data Archiving?

Data Archiving is the process of securely storing aged or inactive salesforce data for a specified period of retention. Some businesses are mandated by the industry regulations to retain data for certain period. Archiving, the process of selecting subsets of historical data from production environment to move it to the external long-term storages.

Why Salesforce data Archiving is Required?

Salesforce is world’s leading CRM solutions provider, the companies who are using Salesforce as its Customer Relationship Management software. Do rely to manage hundreds of millions of records/day across its different cloud services including Sales, Service, Health, and Financial service cloud etc. Due to this many organizations run into data storage limitations. Leading to the need of either deleting or Archiving the aged data to free up some space.

Purchasing additional data storage can cost up to $125 per month for 500 MB per year which is not economical. Hence for optimizing data storage usage, reduced costs, consistent application performance, and Regulatory compliance. It is important to Archive the Salesforce data lying as inactive data for such organizations.

Importance of Salesforce Data Archiving:

Does Salesforce have its in-house Archiving Mechanism?

Salesforce do have its built-in Archiving mechanism; but with its own limitations such as it only supports objects like Activities, Tasks and events older than a year for archiving. Apart from this, the limited archiving capability of Salesforce does count against your organization’s storage allocation. This often is a problem for orgs with huge data. Also, the unavailability of complete data archiving in Salesforce puts many organizations at regulatory and legal risk.

What are the available Archiving options?

Top five Salesforce data archiving strategies available in the market today:

• External Objects — The external objects are like custom objects in Salesforce. The main difference being that in external objects, the record data is stored outside the Salesforce Org. In the salesforce org the external object is related to an external data source definition. It also has access to the external system. This solution works best for enterprises where data security is not that critical.
• Heroku-based Solutions –
• Different open source Cloud-based services can also be implemented in order to archive aged data from Salesforce to the Heroku Postgres platform. With the help of bi-directional synchronization between Heroku Postgres, and Salesforce, the Heroku Connect add-on consolidates the data in the Postgres database. Here connection objects like contacts, accounts, and other custom objects in the Salesforce database. However, this is more than archiving purposes. The Heroku Connect is well known for Business Intelligence, CRM Multi-Org Consolidation, and so on.
• Data Extraction –
• Archiving of important Salesforce data is possible with the data extraction process. By using an ETL tool records and data extraction in the form of .csv files can be done directly. By storing the data in flat files in an external system, the internal load reduces. However, this entire process contains a lot of complexities.
• Big Objects — Big Objects is a system of storing big data-based storage system. The design enables storing of billions of records in a read-only format in the trusted Salesforce platform. By using these Big Objects, enterprises store massive volumes of data from an existing object onto the Big Object inside the Salesforce platform. Big objects ensure consistent performance and direct data access for billions of records. Moving of data from primary to Big object storage is not automatic. This requires an enterprise-grade tool to manage the entire process.
• AppExchange Archiving Solutions — For Enterprises there is a variety of popular Salesforce AppExchange app to choose from. One of the archiving solutions available on AppExchange is DataArchiva. It is the only native Data Archiving Solution that is designed for the Salesforce platform. It retains the critical data in Salesforce’s Big Data-based storage system with continuous integrity and accessibility.

Conclusion:

The various types of data archiving strategies available in the market currently, enables enterprises to make a well-informed decision and choose the best possible solution for their Salesforce system. Here would again like to highlight DataArchiva as a highly viable data archiving solution for all types of Salesforce data, metadata, and internal records. This data archiving tool is easy to install and offers several features like auto-scheduling, bulk archiving, and data integration which make this user-friendly application more secure, scalable, accessible and analytical.

About the Author:

This blog has been written by Shuchi Mishra, Salesforce Sr. Business Analyst at IVL Global. With 8 years of working experience in the IT industry, She is actively involved in managing and delivering Salesforce projects through her Project management, Salesforce Consulting, and BA skills. She has expertise in Salesforce’s Sales, Service, Financial service clouds, along with Salesforce Administration. Her area of interest includes Client Interactions, Salesforce Consulting & smooth delivery of the project. She is always ready to accept Challenges and eager to learn new technologies to enhance her skills