Steven
Welch

When we surveyed 30 senior data and IT leaders for The AI Data Readiness Playbook, one of the things we asked was who inside their company would most likely champion getting data ready for AI. Enterprise architecture came out on top at 33%, and senior data leaders named themselves close behind at 30%. The answer … Continued

Picture your next big SaaS renewal that you’ve got coming up. The account rep walks you through usage and a price increase, you push back on the number for a while, and eventually everyone settles on something they can live with. Then someone on your side mentions the AI agent your team wants to connect … Continued

Salesforce Field Audit Trail extends Field History Tracking by archiving changes to selected fields for long-term retention. It primarily serves as an audit mechanism that records details such as who changed a field and when the change occurred. However, despite its long-term retention capabilities, Salesforce Field Audit Trail is not a complete backup, recovery, or … Continued

To export data from Salesforce, you can either use Data Export Service, Data Loader, reports, REST API, Bulk API 2.0, or third-party platforms to extract records and transfer them to external files or systems. The right approach to use in each case depends on your data volume, how often you export, and whether the process … Continued

To protect Electronic Health Record (EHR) data integrated with Salesforce Health Cloud, you have to identify patient records stored in Salesforce, back them up to storage from which the data can be recovered, protect the backup copies with appropriate security controls, and regularly test recovery procedures to ensure that you can restore the information when … Continued

Salesforce backup preserves business records, files, relationships, and metadata from unintentional deletions, overwrites, and config errors. To ensure reliable Salesforce recovery, maintain recoverable backup versions, restore records in the order of dependency, map record IDs when necessary, and verify the results. Establish a backup frequency based on acceptable data loss and test recovery capabilities frequently. … Continued

Salesforce’s capacity to store and manage large amounts of data also creates a need for effective data governance. As organizations continue to accumulate customer and business records into Salesforce, they need clear rules for how that information is managed. This is important because the absence of defined rules and responsibilities around your Salesforce data can … Continued

What Is Flosum? Flosum is a DevOps platform created solely for Salesforce environments. It handles the complete release lifecycle, including: The big difference between Flosum and many other options is in its commitment to working only with Salesforce; instead of relying on external servers, the entire application operates in a dedicated Salesforce org, with metadata … Continued

The vast majority of Salesforce data is heavily underutilized, being stuck inside the customer relationship management (CRM) platform with limited querying options, problematic joining with other sources, and restricted via API limits that make most large-scale analyses impractical. Moving that Salesforce data into Snowflake allows it to be used for advanced analytics among other use … Continued

Every operation performed in Salesforce creates a record that could provide insight into how a company interacts with its customers, manages opportunities, delivers services, and moves deals through the pipeline. Over time, these individual records accumulate into a historical record which, when properly prepared and analyzed, can reveal why outcomes occurred and how similar situations … Continued

What Is Salesforce Data Masking? What exactly is Salesforce data masking and how does it differ from encryption, tokenization, or anonymization? Salesforce Data Masking replaces sensitive data’s values in sandbox or non-production orgs with fake substitutes that look realistic enough to pass format validation: a name would still look like a name, and a phone … Continued

Traditional CRM workflows have, since their inception, helped organizations to manage customer relationships, track opportunities, and simplify business operations.  However, the sales, service, and marketing teams that rely on these workflow modes still face challenges such as manual data entry, inconsistent forecasting, slow response times, and disconnected data. Over the past few years, AI-powered Salesforce … Continued

Dreamforce is back in San Francisco, and it’s shaping up to be the biggest one yet. Three days at Moscone Center, tens of thousands of Trailblazers, and a full week of keynotes, product news, and parties packed into the streets of SoMa. If you’re heading out for it, this guide covers what you need to … Continued

Salesforce doesn’t fail because of bad CRM strategy. It fails because of what’s underneath it: messy data, manual workarounds, and tools bolted on without a plan. This article breaks down the categories that matter, compares fifteen of the market’s top solutions, and gives you a real framework for building a stack that fits your team … Continued

Ai4 is North America’s largest conference built around the applied, real-world side of AI. It’s not a research conference, and it’s not built around one vendor’s product roadmap. It’s where business executives, technology leaders, and vendors across every industry show up to compare notes on what’s actually working when you try to put AI into … Continued

What actually separates GRAX and Odaseva is not which one can be a more reliable solution for creating Salesforce backups – since both can do that well. What’s important is where your Salesforce history should live once it’s protected: as files in your own cloud that any tool can query, or in the vendor’s vault, … Continued

As Salesforce environments continue to grow in volume and complexity, the need for tools to protect sensitive information, maintain compliance, and manage and deploy data has never been this important. A compliance gap or failed deployment can cost businesses far more than money; it can waste time and even cost them their credibility. This is … Continued

Ask five people on your Salesforce team what “data migration” means and you’ll get five different answers. One person describes a sandbox refresh. Another means a full org cutover. Somebody, somewhere, uses “migration” and “sync” like they’re interchangeable. They’re not, and that mix-up is the expensive one. This isn’t really a vocabulary problem. It’s a … Continued

Salesforce data drives far more than CRM workflows. It informs executive decisions, supports regulatory compliance, powers customer-facing applications, and feeds the analytics that the whole business depends on. But the value of that data is directly tied to how current it is, and that is where a lot of organizations quietly hit a wall. Most … Continued

For companies operating across borders, data residency is not an abstract compliance concern. It shapes how systems get built, how teams work, and how much regulatory risk the business is carrying at any given moment. In China specifically, the requirements are strict, the enforcement is real, and the consequences of getting it wrong are significant. … Continued

Three months. That is how far back Salesforce’s native historical trend reporting goes. For a sales team trying to understand whether a deal that slipped last quarter reflects a pattern or an anomaly, that window closes fast. Leadership wants to know what changed, when it changed, and why the forecast looked different two quarters ago. … Continued

Customer records, financial information, sales pipelines, employee data — Salesforce routinely stores some of the most sensitive information an organization deals with. As such, the sheer scale and interconnected nature of it turns Salesforce data protection into a business-critical priority, not a simple compliance checkbox. Having a firm grasp of the risks, trust implications, and … Continued

Regulatory compliance in financial services is not a checkbox exercise. Broker-dealers managing client data, communications, and transaction records in Salesforce face real consequences when their recordkeeping infrastructure does not hold up under examination. FINRA Rule 4511 sits at the center of those obligations, and firms that underestimate its reach tend to find out the hard … Continued

Managing permissions in Salesforce may seem like a breeze at first, but it doesn’t take long to realize it’s actually a complex task. As soon as you encounter your first unusual situation, things start to get confusing. You’re left wondering who has access to what, and how they got it. The problem is, when you … Continued

What is a Salesforce Data Retention Policy? A data retention policy in Salesforce can be defined as a formal framework governing how long different data types are going to be retained within a Salesforce platform before being archived, anonymized, or deleted. The policy applies to standard and custom objects, files, and integrated systems — all … Continued

In a world where data is a competitive advantage, businesses need full access and ownership over their Salesforce data. While Salesforce’s Data Cloud offers a zero-copy approach to data sharing, and the Snowflake zero-copy clone feature allows for instant replication of Snowflake data without duplicating storage, organizations also need flexible solutions to seamlessly bring external … Continued

What is GDPR and how does it apply to Salesforce? The General Data Protection Regulation mandates binding rules for organizations when it comes to how they are supposed to acquire, store, and process the personal data of individuals in the European Union. Businesses that use Salesforce cannot opt out of GDPR compliance, since the platform … Continued

What is Salesforce data analytics and why does it matter? Salesforce data analytics is the process of analyzing, interpreting, and acting on the CRM data stored in Salesforce to drive smarter business decisions. The data that organizations build up in Salesforce is some of their most precious and, in many cases, most underutilized business assets. … Continued

Welcome to the world of Salesforce data protection, where safeguarding your Salesforce data is key to business continuity. Two leading players in Salesforce data management are GRAX and Own. Backing up and recovering critical Salesforce data is crucial, and there are lots of solutions available. But how do you choose the best one for your … Continued

If you ask any Salesforce admin about the project they dislike the most, you’ll likely get a similar response: migrating data. It’s not that the tools are inadequate, they’re actually quite good, but more so that the risks are high and there’s little room for mistakes. When the data is imported correctly, the CRM functions … Continued

Most life sciences organizations didn’t put “rethink our CRM platform” on their strategic agenda for the year. The Veeva Salesforce split put it there anyway.  And for a lot of these organizations, it’s not a small thing to work through. It’s not just a version upgrade or a feature migration. It’s a change to the … Continued

CapStorm Technology Now Part of GRAX I’ll work my way to “What is CopyStorm” but what I want to start with is: Most of our customers can achieve 3–5 minute replication windows for analytics and reporting purposes in near real-time. When it comes to managing your business’s critical data, Salesforce is the clear leader, enabling … Continued

When teams talk about backup and disaster recovery in Salesforce, RPO and RTO come up constantly. But in practice, they’re often misunderstood, or worse, assumed. You’ll see vendors claim “point-in-time recovery,” but only run backups once per day. That leaves you exposed to nearly a full day of potential data loss. And when something actually … Continued

What Is the Salesforce Recycle Bin and Why Does It Exist? If you work in Salesforce long enough, you’ll eventually delete something you didn’t mean to. Sometimes it’s a single record. Sometimes it’s thousands. Either way, that moment of “we need that back” happens more often than most teams would like to admit. The Salesforce … Continued

Picking a Salesforce edition feels like a licensing decision. In practice, it’s closer to an architectural one, and most organizations don’t realize that until they’re already locked in. For the first year or two, the gaps between editions are mostly invisible. Deals get tracked, reports get pulled, the team moves on. Then someone tries to … Continued

Salesforce TDX 2026 is almost here, and if you work anywhere in the Salesforce ecosystem as a developer, admin, architect, or partner – the next few weeks deserve a spot on your radar.  Two days of intensive technical learning, hands-on sessions with the engineers actually creating the products you use, and participating in the community … Continued

In 2021, the average cost of a data breach hit a 17 year high. Last year, every data breach cost companies approximately $3.86M per incident. The current average is roughly $4.24M per data breach. Recently, representatives from top technology companies, including Google, Okta, Slack, and Salesforce, have created a partnership to develop a cybersecurity baseline. … Continued

If you’re evaluating Salesforce Shield, you’ve probably already hit the wall where native Salesforce security feels insufficient. Maybe compliance came knocking. Maybe legal asked a question about field-level data history that nobody could answer. Maybe your security team flagged that sensitive data sitting in Salesforce wasn’t encrypted at rest, and suddenly that felt less acceptable … Continued

How Are Veeva and Salesforce Connected? The shared architectural history of Veeva and Salesforce is profound – a history that defined how life science companies built their commercial capabilities for more than a decade. This shared history should be well understood before deciding on any data migration actions. What is Veeva in Salesforce and how … Continued

Most organizations are under the impression that they own their Salesforce data.  From their point of view, their teams are logging in every day for things like generating reports or updating dashboards. Looking at things through a practical standpoint, everything feels controlled. But ownership and access are not the same thing, and knowing the difference … Continued

A Salesforce data incident typically refers to any event that corrupts, deletes, overwrites, or misaligns Salesforce records, metadata, or object relationships. These incidents can be triggered by deployments, user errors, integrations, or schema changes. Understanding how they happen is the first step toward preventing them. Many Salesforce data incidents begin with what looks like a … Continued

Salesforce has become an essential customer relationship management (CRM) platform for businesses, aiding them in establishing strong connections with their customers. However, due to the large amount of data stored in Salesforce, it is crucial to ensure its security and integrity. With options ranging from Salesforce’s native solutions to specialized platforms like Own and GRAX … Continued