Effective July 31, 2020, Salesforce has discontinued the Salesforce Data Recovery service. This move is seen as a huge win for third-party cloud backup and disaster recovery (BDR) services like OwnBackup, Odaseva, and Spanning from Kaseya, among many others.
This decision by the CRM giant puts all of the data protection responsibilities on the backs of the customer. It paints a potentially painful and quite dark. It will put many businesses one ransomware attack, natural disaster, and employee mistake away from the costly disruption that could shut their doors for good.
While there is no doubt that Data Recovery service from Salesforce was never the end-all solution for data protection and recovery, many in the CRM world feel that it is wrong for Salesforce to state that backup and recovery is the customer’s responsibility.
In fact, Salesforce has clearly told customers and partners to visit the Salesforce AppExchange and look out for the word “backup” for third-party options that can protect data associated with the cloud CRM platform. The top three search results as of August 3, 2020, include OwnBackup, Spanning, and Odaseva.
However, this doesn’t make them the first, nor the last. In fact, if the customers of G-Suite and Microsoft 365 (formerly known as Office 365) have a look at their service level agreements (SLAs), they would be shocked to see that there is no mention of backup and recovery.
Interestingly, SLAs primarily discuss making the service and infrastructure available and provide no assurances to customers that data will survive any kind of attack, outage, or accident.
In today’s time when protecting data is mission-critical for the resiliency and longevity of businesses and organizations, especially with the challenging times imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, Salesforce taking away Data Recovery service will only help bad actors exploit exposed data and may prompt a record-breaking amount of cybersecurity attacks. In fact, cyberattacks have increased by 400 percent during the pandemic as per the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Internet Crime Complaint Center.
Do leave your comments on how you perceive and plan to handle this situation.
