The Top 4 Reasons Your Salesforce Data and Metadata Needs More Protection (and What to Do About It)

Salesforce recently announced that it was ranked as the number one customer relationship management (CRM) provider for the tenth consecutive year. With more than 150,000 customers, your company may well be among those that depend on Salesforce to keep track of customer interactions, sales data, and more.

Salesforce and The Shared Responsibility Model

A glance at the company’s shared responsibility model web page notes that Salesforce takes security seriously and provides multiple security controls and settings to mitigate risks. But you, the customer, are ultimately responsible for the data within Salesforce that you create, modify, delete, update, or manage using manual or automated systems or processes.

Protecting, securing, and managing your Salesforce data and metadata should be among your top priorities because it’s a high-priority target for hackers. A recent report from SaaS Alerts found that cybercriminals have shifted their attacks to mobile devices—by a whopping 50 percent—with Salesforce and Slack generating the most critical alerts on a per-user/per-alert basis.

Still not convinced? Read on for the top four reasons your focus must include protecting and securing your Salesforce data and metadata.

1. Ransomware Attacks and Malicious Users

Hackers recognize that if they can lock down your Salesforce data with ransomware, your company’s operations come to a screeching halt. And you’ll seriously consider paying the ransom. (Which you shouldn’t). Even worse, all it takes is a single disgruntled employee or malicious user with access to Salesforce to cause what could be irreparable damage due to data being destroyed.

2. Errors Due to Accidental Changes

According to the Verizon 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report, 82 percent of breaches involved the human element. But human-introduced errors often cause data overwrites or otherwise damage your Salesforce data, rendering it unusable in its current state. Even unplanned or accidental record deletions could cause your system to become unusable until the data is restored.

3. Corruptions Caused By Integrations

Integrating a third-party application into your Salesforce deployment could corrupt your data. It’s even possible that a component within the integration interface could crash, making your data inaccessible. Invalid data flows between systems due to integration issues could be another cause of data corruption. 

4. Errors Due to Bulk Data Updates or Massive Migrations

Large data uploads can introduce significant errors, depending on the tools being used, rendering your data partially or entirely unusable due to uncorrectable errors. And during massive data migrations, even taking precautions doesn’t eliminate the potential for your data to become corrupted.

Salesforce’s Native Backup and Restore Has Limitations (and Costs)

Salesforce offers ways to back up and restore your data free of charge. But these all require manual processes and specialized expertise. And data exports can only be run weekly or monthly, exporting all data as .csv files.

While Salesforce offers tools like Data Loader and APIs that allow you to restore your data manually, the order in which the data is restored is crucial so relational data can be preserved. Salesforce also recommends that you use their professional services team for complex restores, which come with a flat fee of $10,000, according to TechTarget. 

Salesforce’s free options don’t include storage—you need to provide that—and exports must be downloaded within a week, after which they are deleted. 

Arcserve SaaS Backup: Salesforce Data Protection Made Easy

TechTarget notes that Salesforce’s data protection limitations highlight the need for SaaS backup. And Arcserve SaaS Backup is the answer. Here’s why:

Complete Protection for All Custom Objects and Main Standard Objects

Including account, campaign, campaign member, case, contact, event, lead, note, opportunity, task, and other standard objects that the Salesforce API allows Arcserve SaaS Backup to access.

Secure By Design

Arcserve SaaS Backup includes a host of features that protect your data and ensure compliance, including:

• Immutable backups that can’t be altered or deleted by ransomware.
• Military-grade encryption for your data at rest and in transit.
• Multi-factor authentication (MFA) for secure access.
• Role-based access controls (RBAC) to restrict access.
• 30-day delete protection that makes it easy to recover accidental deletions.
• Compliance with the GDPR’s “right to be forgotten.”

Cost Effective Solution Plus Highly Available Backups

Arcserve SaaS Backup is the most cost-effective solution available, with a single price per seat that includes all SaaS data protection functionality. Even better, Arcserve SaaS Backup ensures your backups are highly available with dual data center redundancy and unlimited retention of your backups included throughout the life of your subscription. 

Limitless data storage in an online cloud tier is also included so that you can count on fast access and restores. And there aren’t any additional fees for data traffic, including ingress, egress, and transactions.

Complete Restore 

Arcserve SaaS Backup provides complete restore functionality for your Salesforce data and metadata across your production and sandbox environments. That includes all data objects, fields, and records.

Get Expert Guidance for Salesforce Data Protection

Arcserve technology partners offer the expertise and experience that can make implementing Arcserve SaaS Backup for your Salesforce deployment simple. Find an Arcserve partner here, and learn more about Arcserve SaaS Backup by requesting a free demo.