Over the last decade, CRM data has become central to daily business operations and long-term strategy. However, this CRM growth has also been accompanied by increases in malicious data attacks and a heightened risk of accidental data deletion due to the complexity of CRM customizations. As a result, organization’s use of CRM backup has confidently increased.

With World Backup Day approaching, many organizations are increasing their attention to potential security threats and blindspots in their backup processes. Simply put, just backing up your CRM data isn’t enough — you need to consider your security, how effectively you’re capturing the intricacies of your CRM hierarchy, and how thorough your restore process is, should you need to use it.

As some food for thought on World Backup Day, here’s the backup trends CIOs should be aware of in the coming year and how they can support your existing CRM backup approach.

Cloud Backups

Most CRMs are cloud-hosted and organizations appreciate the ease of access and collaboration that this provides. However, despite recognising these benefits of cloud, a surprising number of organizations still choose to backup their CRM data on-site. This holds them back in a number of ways:

• Collaboration and accessibility: cloud-hosted backups can be accessed at any time from anywhere, which means there’s no risk of an onsite outage that prevents access. Backups in the cloud can also be accessed and updated by your entire team, allowing you to save the most up-to-date version of your live data and environment structures.
• Security: cloud-driven solutions meet high compliance requirements, and often provide additional security infrastructure that would be costly for you to implement in your onsite storage.
• Cost and scalability: with a cloud-hosted backup solution, you can increase your storage capacity and requirements as you need. These solutions often use a SaaS model, which allows you to increase your subscription tier as needed, rather than outright purchasing or building more storage for your own onsite hosting.

As the State of Salesforce DevOps Report highlights, the vast majority of Salesforce teams (87%) currently back up their Salesforce orgs or plan to implement backups in 2024. However, some organizations still don’t use a cloud-based backup solution and miss out on these added benefits. As awareness grows, we expect the trend away from onsite hosting to continue in 2024.

Automation-Enhanced Backup Solutions

Automation-enhanced backup solutions are established and acceptable for most organization’s compliance standards. We expect to see a greater range of automation solutions offered and implemented in the coming year.

Human error is a prominent cause of both data loss and incomplete backups. It’s easy to forget to manually make a backup or miss a step in the process. Automation simplifies the backup process and removes the need for human intervention to carry out backup protocols.

Automated backup systems can automatically gather, encrypt and transfer data to the backup server. This simplifies the user interface and process, allowing your CRM end users to access and maintain backups with clicks. You can configure the frequency of your backups while retaining the control to manually create a backup when needed, for example, after releasing a new feature. As a result, the risk of human error is far lower because the system itself is simplified and an automated process ensures that your backups are made at a regular frequency.

Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS)

Disaster recovery is the set of systems and processes you put in place to recover your CRM after a serious data loss, breach or downtime. Naturally, each organization will have different disaster recovery approaches as their CRM configuration and teams will differ. However, there are some key best practices that all teams should follow:

• Set out a clear plan for disaster recovery that highlights the roles and responsibilities of team members should you need to recover from an incident.
• Map out your systems and restore processes, such as how you’ll identify the extent of data loss, which tools you’ll use for recovery, and the order in which you’ll restore data.
• Regularly practice your disaster recovery plan so your team is familiar with the process and prepared if an incident does occur.

These best practices should serve any organization and CRM well, so there’s a trend toward using DRaaS providers of the broad framework and tooling for recovery.

Just as hosting your backups in the cloud protects you from the risk of onsite disruptions, like power outages, DRaaS ensures that you’ll still be able to recover your CRM data and restore operations even if your team and local infrastructure cannot. This provides an extra layer of security to your backup approach by giving you a failover in the event of a widespread disruption.

According to an SNS Insider report, the DRaaS market is projected to expand to over $41 billion by 2030 as more organizations include it in their business continuity plans. We expect to see adoption continue to increase in the coming year.

What are you Planning?

World Backup Day is a great opportunity to begin or reignite discussions about backup and security in your organization. Whether you’re planning to adopt automation or are still encouraging your organization to move towards a cloud-hosted backup system, keep highlighting the risks of data loss and ideas for better solutions.