While most of my Salesforce friends are honing in on artificial intelligence (AI), and the benefits of these new ‘magical’ solutions, earning the Data Protection Superbadge allowed me to pivot in a different direction to think about the difficulty of protecting this ever-growing pile of data. Imagine a chef gathering the perfect ingredients for a pot of soup – your data protection solutions need to work well together or else you’ll end up with an inedible pot of mush.
How to Identify Corrupted Data
It’s like when you taste a soup and sense that there is something wrong with it, but you can’t identify which ingredient caused it. Similarly, detecting data corruption in Salesforce is like trying to find the spice that might have under-seasoned the soup or the measurement that wasn’t exactly right, turning your soup into a stew. It’s hard to find the exact records that have been affected by the corruption because Salesforce never stops working, and there is always sales and support activity going on.
Fortunately, this Superbadge unit assumes that Salesforce is a static system, which makes this challenge much simpler to solve. This does not, however, reflect reality! To truly identify data corruption, you need a full picture of what the data looked like before the change, then after the change. Field History tracking has value, but a full picture of all data changes is better!
How to Recover Corrupted Data
When it comes to recovering corrupted data in Salesforce, there are various tools to choose from, such as data loader, data import wizard, and other similar options. However, based on the permissions granted by Salesforce, using any of these tools comes with limitations, as well as the native validations and automations set up to maintain the quality of Salesforce data.
Validation rules act like a lid on a soup pot with a small hole, perfectly sized for adding fine herbs. If I need to add the holy trinity (onion, carrot, and celery, for those that don’t know) to the pot, I must first remove the lid. Similarly, before importing data, I need to turn off validation rules and other automations. This is because validation rules are designed to work with specific data input flows and may block valid data from being imported correctly.
While the challenge made recovering data simple, In reality, data recovery is not always this straightforward. It is vitally important to always consider the potential changes that these updates might cause to other records.
How to Avoid Data Corruption Altogether
Setting up a weekly data export was a part of this challenge, and I cringe every time I hear the term “weekly export.” Why?
- It’s a copy of data in an unsecured format (CSVs)
- On somebody’s computer, usually a laptop
- Weekly data loses its value if it is not most-up-to-date version
This process grants massive data visibility to anyone who has access to the computer, and fixing data corruption from a CSV is very complex if there are any sort of data relationships involved. Plus, it’s stale data! I certainly hope that Sales updates their deals more than once a week!
Instead of reactive repairs, take proactive steps to avoid data corruption by running a backup before implementing a new integration, testing recovery to make sure that it works, and limiting the amount of data that each user can modify.
Protect Your Salesforce Data With CapStorm
Safeguarding your Salesforce data with CapStorm is like crafting a hearty soup from scratch, where every ingredient harmonizes perfectly. Much like a simmering pot on the stove, CapStorm’s Salesforce backup and data recovery solutions shield your invaluable Salesforce data from corruption. With our Salesforce backup, data recovery, and restore solutions, you can:
- Implement automated backups up to every 3 minutes.
- Perform full and incremental data backups on demand.
- Verify data backup accuracy and completeness.
CapStorm enables your Salesforce data to stay within your database, behind your firewall, providing the ultimate data protection. This gives you full, autonomous control over your own data instead of handing your data to a third party. Check out some of the other ways our solutions have helped our customers.
If you’d like to learn more about CapStorm’s offerings, talk to our experts today.
