Salesforce is the world’s most successful CRM system and also one of the most successful SaaS companies in the world. For organisations using Salesforce, their most valuable information, which is their customer data, is stored in the system. More than that, day to day customer interactions and operations, from quotes through to orders, through the technical support cases, can all be operationalised through Salesforce with the data of record stored in Salesforce as well.  

With this in mind, you would think that companies would invest in backing up Salesforce, but the reality is that many do not do so. They believe that Salesforce themselves protects their data. This is true, but the service levels and costs of retrieving lost data from Salesforce are prohibitive. Recovering data will cost $10,000 and take a minimum of two weeks. It’s not a viable data protection strategy; it’s a course of last resort.
That said, why should you worry about protecting and backing up your Salesforce data?
 
Salesforce data can be lost or corrupted

Upgrades can and do go wrong, disgruntled employees can remove or alter data, third-party applications that link to Salesforce can cause data integrity issues, problems can occur importing data, and there have even been examples (though rare) where Salesforce themselves have lost customer data.
 
Mistakes Can Cause Data Loss

Humans make mistakes, and sometimes can cause data to be deleted or overwritten with inaccurate or incorrect data. It may not be intentional, but the result is the same, your company loses data. It’s not just your users. Salesforce employees can also make mistakes. Back in 2018, an API update by Salesforce led to a period of 45 days where customers data could have been corrupted.
 
Malware and cyber breach

Just because it’s SaaS, it doesn’t mean your data is not subject to a cyberattack. If you Google for cases, you will see numerous instances where cyberattacks have successfully targeted Salesforce, sometimes corrupting data, sometimes stealing data and other times rendering Salesforce inaccessible. Backup is always the last defence against a cyber breach.
 
Continuity

When Salesforce stops, so do your employees. While it is rare that the Salesforce SaaS service goes down, for instance, if Salesforce experiences serious data corruption, it may not be useable even if the instance is running. Without a separate backup solution which can recover your data in hours, you may be waiting for weeks to get fully operational.

To find out more about why you need a third-party backup for Salesforce, read our whitepaper here