Protecting Your Data Legacy: Unlimited Salesforce Field History Tracking

Improve field audit trail capabilities with unlimited data retention for Salesforce History Objects with GRAX High Trust.

What is Salesforce Field History Tracking?

After enabling field history tracking, this feature acts like a limited time machine for your data within the Salesforce platform. It allows businesses to keep a detailed historical log of changes made to specific fields in Salesforce standard or custom objects, including who made the changes, when they were made, and the old and new values. This level of transparency enhances data accuracy, aids in compliance and auditing, and empowers businesses to make well-informed decisions based on historical data trends. It’s an essential tool for maintaining data integrity and leveraging the full potential of Salesforce data for organizations, especially for standard objects like:

• Lead,
• Account,
• Contact,
• Case,
• And Opportunity.

Salesforce Field History Tracking Limitations

Out of the box, Salesforce’s solution is available in multiple editions and makes it straightforward to set up history tracking for objects and fields. Fortunately, the field history tracking data isn’t counted against your organization’s storage limits; however, Salesforce does impose other limitations, such as:

• 20 Tracked Fields Max: Field History Tracking allows you to track changes for up to 20 fields per object per object. 

• 18 – 24 Month Retention Period: The data retention period for field history tracking is 18 months and up to 24 months using the Salesforce API / Data Loader. 

• 255 Character Limit: For changes to fields you want to track that have over 255 characters, Salesforce only captures the fact that it was edited, but the new and old values themselves are not recorded.

• Limited Reporting: While Salesforce does offer built-in history reports for some of the standard object history types, not all field types will be accessible for historical trend analysis. 

To get beyond some of these limitations, Users of Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited Editions can purchase the Field Audit Trail add-on as part of Salesforce Shield to enable history tracking for a maximum of 60 fields and provide the ability to retain data beyond 24 months.

Why it matters

Salesforce Field History Tracking enables businesses to make the most of their data, minimize risks, and build a foundation for successful decision-making and growth. Salesforce Field History Tracking is crucial for maintaining data integrity, meeting regulatory compliance, promoting transparency and accountability, facilitating data analysis, enabling data recovery, and enhancing security measures.

• Data Integrity and Accuracy: Tracking field history ensures data integrity and accuracy by providing a complete audit trail of data modifications. Having a transparent view of data changes helps prevent data errors, identify potential issues, and correct inaccuracies.

• Compliance and Auditing: Many industries have strict regulatory compliance requirements that demand organizations to maintain comprehensive data records. This is crucial for passing audits and demonstrating adherence to data governance and industry regulations.

• Transparency and Accountability: Users can easily trace back the history of changes to specific fields and identify who made the changes and when. This level of transparency helps promote responsible data management practices and fosters a culture of accountability.

• Data Recovery and Restoration: In the event of accidental data loss or data corruption, historical field data serves as a safety net. Salesforce administrators can use the historical data to find previous values to re-enter, minimizing the impact of data incidents and ensuring business continuity.

• Security and Fraud Detection: Suspicious or unauthorized changes to critical data fields can be easily identified, and organizations can take appropriate actions to address potential security breaches or unauthorized access.

• Decision Making and Analysis: Historical data is a valuable resource for making informed decisions and conducting data analysis. With this historical dataset, businesses can analyze trends, patterns, and historical performance to gain deeper insights into customer behavior, sales trends, and operational efficiency. These insights empower organizations to make data-driven decisions and develop effective strategies.

GRAX High Trust’s feature to automate the backup of history objects with unlimited data retention empowers businesses to retain those detailed historical records of changes for as long as they need.

With this feature, we give back control to businesses, ensuring compliance with the strictest regulatory standards. But it doesn’t stop there – GRAX unlocks the door to a treasure trove of historical insights, empowering enterprises to delve deep into their data’s past, extracting invaluable gems from historical trends and patterns.

Joe Gaska, Head of Product @ GRAX

What it includes

Support for data backup of history objects is included as part of our GRAX High Trust offering. GRAX High Trust now comprises:

• Robust backup architecture that can be deployed to your cloud environment  – AWS, Azure, GCP, and others
  
• Immutable object storage that prevents any changes to Salesforce data objects once they are written to your storage.
  
• Support compliance regulations like HIPAA with BAA, FINRA, FedRamp, etc.
  
• Unlimited data retention of Salesforce history objects where automated backups capture your Salesforce field history datasets – giving back full data ownership and control of your history

Salesforce Field History Tracking is an indispensable tool amplified thousands of times by GRAX High Trust’s unlimited data retention of field history data versions, which helps organizations in the quest for comprehensive data governance and success in the digital landscape. With GRAX High Trust, highly compliant businesses can fortify their data management practices, enhance security, and make informed, data-driven decisions that lay the foundation for long-term success. 

Who it benefits and impacts

With this new GRAX High Trust functionality, organizations can enhance data management, decision-making, and compliance practices, contributing to a more robust and accountable data ecosystem. They gain greater control over their historical data, allowing them to maintain detailed records for compliance, auditing, and regulatory purposes. Extended data retention ensures that historical information is always available in their storage environment, enabling better decision-making and data analysis.

• Data Governance and Compliance Teams: Data governance and compliance teams are crucial in ensuring that organizations adhere to industry regulations and data protection standards. With this feature, these teams can more effectively manage and monitor data changes, ensuring data integrity and accountability as well as ensuring that they can produce comprehensive historical data records during audits and compliance checks.
  
• Data Analysts and Business Intelligence Teams: Data analysts and business intelligence teams rely on all of their historical data to derive insights, spot trends and patterns, and make data-driven decisions. GRAX’s unlimited data retention gives them a wealth of historical change information to conduct in-depth data analysis and drive business strategies.
  
• IT Administrators and Data Managers: IT administrators and data managers manage and maintain the organization’s data infrastructure. With a backup of history objects, Admins gain peace of mind knowing they have an extra data safety net with a comprehensive log of field changes, ensuring data availability and business continuity.

GRAX High Trust’s new feature of unlimited data retention for field history tracking significantly impacts businesses by giving their data governance and compliance teams, BI teams, and admins control of their Salesforce data’s field history. 

Learn more

• Try out GRAX for free by signing up for a free trial here.
• Speak with a GRAX product expert to see how our solution can help your organization here.

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GRAX High Trust is generally available soon. Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases, public statements, or public materials are not currently generally available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase GRAX should make their purchase decisions based on currently available features.