Get Started with Archive
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain the business challenges of managing historical data.
- Describe how Archive addresses data management challenges.
- Identify key use cases for data archiving.
- Explain the key benefits of implementing an Archive strategy.
The Data Dilemma
Meet Matt, a Salesforce administrator at Cumulus Cloud Corporation, a growing insurance company with over 500 employees operating in the US and in Europe. Matt faces some familiar data management challenges that are becoming more difficult to manage.
First, the Salesforce org at Cumulus Cloud is slowing down. Reports take longer to run, page loads are sluggish, and users complain about performance issues. The culprit? Years of accumulated data. With thousands of closed opportunities, completed cases, and historical activities, their Salesforce org is bloated with stale and unused records and files. Matt has also noticed that the older data contributes to reporting inaccuracies and skewed metrics.
Meanwhile, Matt’s leadership team has tasked him with ensuring compliance with an expanding web of data privacy regulations. From Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and industry-specific requirements, each regulation requires different data retention periods and the ability to delete customer records upon request.
Finally, Matt is aware of his company’s rapidly growing Salesforce storage costs. As Cumulus Cloud Corporation expanded into new international markets, it’s experienced exponential growth in the volume of customer data stored in Salesforce. Cumulus Cloud exceeded its data storage limits, so the company purchased additional storage from Salesforce. The problem resurfaced within a few months, forcing Cumulus Cloud to once again buy more storage, with no long-term resolution in sight. Matt’s CFO has predicted that the company’s storage expenses are projected to double in the next two years if left unchecked.
Matt realizes that it will be costly and cumbersome to meet the growing data demands with his company’s current software capabilities.
He needs a solution that can help Cumulus Cloud:
- Maintain system performance without losing access to important historical data.
- Comply with multiple data privacy and retention regulations.
- Keep storage costs under control and avoid unplanned and escalating expenses.
- Preserve data relationships and the referential integrity of related records.
The solution? Archive.
What Is Archive?
Archive is a Salesforce-integrated data archiving solution that securely moves historical records to external storage. This improves Salesforce org performance and provides a secure environment for data that’s no longer actively used but must be retained for compliance, auditing, or historical reference purposes. Archive reduces the load on your Salesforce instance, balances regulatory compliance with internal policies, and minimizes storage costs while optimizing productivity.
Archive is easy to use, flexible, and secure: Customize policies, automatically archive data, instantly view and unarchive records, maintain data relationships, and programmatically delete old data. You can unarchive records one at a time or in bulk, designate users to view archived data directly within Salesforce, and set privileges for specific users to unarchive records.
When you use Archive to manage your Salesforce data, your organization can take these actions.
Monitor Storage Consumption
Archive helps you track data and file storage. You can see real-time storage usage percentages from the main dashboard, analyze your org to identify which objects are taking up the most space, and visualize how your storage consumption will be reduced through archiving policies.
Create Custom Policies
Archive helps you manage your Salesforce data lifecycle with custom policies. Since not all data retains the same value over time, archiving and purging data helps implement efficient and sensible data lifecycle management practices.
You can build policies to regularly remove inactive records, files, and attachments from production. And, you can refine criteria to archive specific objects with direct lookups, maintaining data relationships. You can set policies to run automatically on your preferred frequency and define custom retention policies to adhere to your compliance requirements. Archive enables you to retain data for up to 99 years.
Access Archived Data
With Archive, your users can view archived data directly in production via a Lightning web component, based on user permissions that you define. Your users can search for archived records using plain text and (if you allow) unarchive records back into production, when needed.
Navigate Data Compliance
You can maintain secure, encrypted archives with defined retention periods. And Archive enables you to freeze records under active litigation or fulfill requests–such as right-to-be-forgotten requests–to immediately purge personally identifiable information.
What’s Next?
After reviewing these benefits, Matt thinks that Archive can help his company improve the performance of his Salesforce org. He's especially eager to reduce storage costs and stay in compliance with data privacy and data retention regulations. If his sales teams occasionally need to reference historical deal information, Matt won’t have to unarchive those records to the production environment–his team can easily access the archived data through the Salesforce interface.
Matt is excited to get started! But first, he needs to learn how Archive stores and archives data and assess some key considerations for when it’s time to install and configure the Archive product.