Salesforce is now the No. 1 cloud-based CRM software, with which companies of all sizes are now able to establish better connections with customers, partners, employees, and other counterparts. Salesforce also enables better marketing, customer activity tracking, business decision-making with data analytics, and customer support, etc. All business activities can be handled on the Salesforce platform, and a tremendous amount of data is also being stored on Salesforce data storage.
Considering this fact, while implementing Salesforce, it is important to have a foolproof data management plan to effectively use it and ensure proper backup and recoverability of this valuable data. While on Salesforce, the volume of data you handle will keep on growing day by day.
With this, you may need to have a proper approach to managing such a huge data store and avoid any performance degradation with optimization of storage. You may be handling a fair amount of data on a daily basis, and every Salesforce user must be aware of ways to properly manage such huge data volumes.
How have CRMs changed with Salesforce?
Before the introduction of the Salesforce cloud, enterprises used to host their CRMs on their on-premises servers. This incurred a lot of cost and time to manage the same. Once on set up such a CRM, it was not so easy to run it overtime.
Salesforce totally changed this scenario by offering comprehensive CRM software, which functions online. With this, users can avoid the overhead of lengthy and complicated installations and keep everything on the cloud.
Salesforce data storage
On discussing the topic of data security, backup, and recovery, first, you need to know about different types of data storage in Salesforce. Let us explore File Storage and Data Storage on Salesforce. Basically, File Storage is all about storing data like attachment documents, photos, knowledge articles, etc.
On the other hand, Salesforce Data Storage is all about a dedicated space for the storage of Salesforce records. These records cover a broader spectrum of data, including campaign members, cases, contracts, case study groups, email messages, event calendar, accounts, campaigns, opportunities, orders, quotes, tasks with tags, etc.
There are different pricing models for Salesforce data storage. You can choose among the four editions as Essentials, Enterprise, Professional, and Unlimited. The pricing for the Essential edition may cost you nearly $25 per month by offering basic access to Salesforce Data Storage.
The most popular edition is Enterprise storage. Salesforce also offers add-on cloud storage in blocks of 500 MB or 1 GB etc., which costs about an extra $5 or more monthly. A standard implementation of Salesforce data storage may cost about $5,000 to $80,000.
Considering Salesforce Data Storage, you should also know some of the best practices to be followed, as listed below.
- Integrate/merge the objects which are not CRM-related.
- Keep the size of data to a minimum to cut the cost of cloud storage and optimize performance.
- Do data optimization for larger objects.
- Never use data that does not belong to the Salesforce CRM.
- Document all the new releases and changes in a formal way.
Following the data storage, best practices will help you make Salesforce data backup and recovery much easier and cost-effective.
Checking Salesforce Data Storage
On all the editions of Salesforce, you can go to the Setup and search for “Storage” in the Find box to see your storage use. You can see the limit, already used, percentage of storage used, and the breakdown of storage used by each type. You can also see the popular users for each genre in that tab. Once you run out of storage space, there are many ways to upgrade your data storage. Here are a few.
- Use tools like Mass Delete Records, Salesforce Data Loader, etc.
- There are many third-party tools also for data movements using which you can remove the superfluous files.
- Go to Salesforce Data Storage and delete records manually.
If you find it difficult to remove files, then you may look for a good tool at the App Exchange for data cleanup. There are many good options like Task Archiver, which can help relocate the tasks to files or delete the tasks which fulfill the deletion criteria set.
You can also think of purchasing additional data storage or upgrading to the latest Salesforce edition at an extra cost. You need a strong business methodology and workflow to maintain the Salesforce data instances well and stay ahead of all difficulties.
Data management best practices
Have an effective strategy for reporting and archiving
Salesforce offers many tools that help enterprises with big data volumes handle it more effectively. However, these tools may not be effective without a proper plan to use those well.
Get good data management tools
If you have a proper data management strategy in place, you have to think of the best ways to execute it. The good thing here is that Salesforce offers various tools to help with this. Some of the best tools to consider are Data Storage Optimizer and Big Objects etc., which will help in archiving Salesforce data without the need for any external application.
Manual removal of unnecessary data
If you find unnecessary data in the Salesforce account, then you may delete the same. This is necessary to prevent any performance from degrading. You can delete the data manually, and there are also various tools in the App Exchange for data deletion.
Mass deletion of Salesforce data
The Mass Delete Wizard of Salesforce is a web-based application that will let you delete many Leads, Cases, Accounts, Activities, Products, Solutions, and Reports, etc., at once. The limit of Mass Delete wizard is 250 records which can be used to delete named objects. Mass Delete is available with all editions of Salesforce. ETL (Extract, Transform, and Loading) tools like Data Loader can be used for bulk data migration and data removal.
Salesforce offers many reliable and quick solutions for managing data in real-time. Make sure that you have analysis-ready data all the time, being stored at the desired destination by optimizing time and cost to maintain it.
