Get to Know the Data Landscape and Data Cloud
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe the current data landscape and its challenges.
- Explain the need for a centralized and unified data platform.
- Define Data Cloud and its core capabilities.
Before You Start
This badge is part of the Data Cloud: Unlock the Value of Your Data trail. The trail explains the strategic importance and benefits of Salesforce Data Cloud. In this badge, you learn data fundamentals, define Data Cloud and explore the history of the product and market.
Understand the Complex Data Landscape
Organizations today navigate a complex data landscape, with a diverse array of data sources, systems, and technologies. Many organizations spend a lot of time (and investment!) managing various data lakes, warehouses, and systems–each built to meet a specific need. These systems were designed to work together, but data often ends up scattered and not easily accessible.
There are several critical data challenges.
- Data silos: Businesses struggle to create seamless customer experiences with data distributed across various systems and stored in unstructured formats like Slack interactions, PDFs, Google documents, videos, and support tickets.
- Unreliable insights: Turning all structured and unstructured data into a source of reliable customer insights and knowledge that can be used safely across the organization is challenging. Scattered enterprise data and knowledge can’t be integrated and governed, which results in disjointed insights.
- Poor actionability: Organizations face delays and bottlenecks in moving from insights to action, preventing them from responding to market demands as well as employee and customer needs in the flow of work.
The prevalence of these challenges is backed up by data. According to the 2025 Connectivity Benchmark Report from MuleSoft, 71% of applications within a company are disconnected and 43% of business leaders don’t trust the quality of their data. Moreover, 80% of leaders struggle to drive business priorities with data.
To resolve these challenges, data from across different sources needs to be integrated. Historically, integrating data from various systems meant physically copying data into a centralized platform, which was time-consuming, resource-intensive, and ineffective. The answer isn’t moving data; it’s connecting and unifying it. Organizations need a comprehensive platform capable of unifying data from diverse sources, providing a complete customer 360 view, and turning that data into action. Enter Data Cloud.
Learn About Data Cloud
Data Cloud is a centralized platform that connects and unifies data from disparate sources, creates analytics and insights, and activates that data for use in Customer 360 applications and Agentforce.
Explore Real Time, Zero Copy, and the Foundation of AI
Data Cloud is a real-time platform with near-instant access to customer interactions across systems. It analyzes that data and updates customer profiles in less than a second. You can understand and respond to customer actions as soon as they happen, which enhances customer experiences and improves efficiency. Learn more in Real-Time Use Cases for Data Cloud.
Data Cloud also has zero-copy capabilities. This means Data Cloud can share data and access external data freely without duplicating it. It integrates with external data sources, such as data warehouses and data lakes, and establishes bidirectional communication. Learn more in Data Cloud with Zero Copy.
Data Cloud is the foundation of AI. Deliver unified, trusted data from across your organization to your AI agents and predictive models. Data Cloud powers vital features for effective agents, such as retrieval augmented generation (RAG), which grounds agent responses in business data, and the Einstein Trust Layer, which establishes security and compliance guardrails. Learn more in Data Cloud-Powered Agentforce.
In the next unit, discover the data processing stages of Data Cloud and core functionality for each stage.