OwnBackup believes that no company operating on the cloud should ever lose data. With SaaS/PaaS data backup and recovery, archiving, management, and compliance/support, OwnBackup helps organizations better protect and manage their Salesforce data and development environments. To find out more about their platform we sat down with Sam Gutmann, CEO of OwnBackup:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to OwnBackup?
A: OwnBackup was co-founded by data-recovery, data protection, and information-security experts. They started OwnBackup on the belief that data should be safe and accessible no matter where it’s stored, so the founders built a data protection platform that integrates with leading SaaS/PaaS solutions, including Salesforce.
OwnBackup has received a lot of recognition recently. We have 115+ five-star reviews on the Salesforce AppExchange. I’m also proud to say that we’ve won numerous awards, including the 2015 Gartner Cool Vendor award, 2016 Salesforce ISV Innovation award, and six Salesforce Demo Jam Awards. Our Demo Jams have a twist to them about halfway through – it delights the audience every time.
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Q: Why do companies need OwnBackup to protect their SaaS data? Doesn’t Salesforce, and other SaaS providers already backup data for them?
A: That’s the real question! Many data administrators have that misconception, but if you lose data it could takes weeks or months and cost thousands of dollars if you don’t have the right backup and recovery solution in place. When it comes to accidental or malicious data loss and corruption, backing up and restoring that is the responsibility of the client. Building a data protection strategy is therefore up to the customer. SaaS providers do keep backups, but they’re not meant to help individual companies recover records that were accidentally deleted or metadata that was corrupted by bad code. Rather, these backups are meant to help SaaS providers stay up and running in the case of a rare outage.
Last year at Dreamforce, we asked over 1,000 Salesforce users if they’ve ever experienced a data loss. Surprisingly, the survey results showed that most companies using Salesforce are unprepared. In fact, 88 percent have no comprehensive backup and recovery process, even though 24 percent have experienced a Salesforce data loss. Our respondents said that the top “villains” of Salesforce data loss were accidental deletion, bad code, rogue integrations, and malicious employees.
Companies are truly starting to realize the importance of safeguarding their SaaS data. Data faces the same risks whether it resides in a server you own, a server in the cloud, or data on a SaaS application.
Q: How do companies who don’t currently have OwnBackup recover lost or corrupted SaaS data?
A: If they’re taking the time to backup, and they’re not using OwnBackup, they’re likely using an out-of-the-box solution. While many SaaS solutions, such as Salesforce, have out-of-the-box backup solutions, these can be extremely difficult to use if you actually have to restore data using these backups. For example, the Weekly Export is Salesforce’s most commonly used out-of-the-box backup solution. It offers a once-a-week downloadable set of Excel-based files of Salesforce objects. Users have a 48-hour window to capture this backup before it is deleted. Companies that rely on the Weekly Export also have to follow multiple steps to use this set of Excel files for comparison purposes to not only find missing data, but also to prepare multiple insert/upsert restore data files.
We put together an eBook on the “7 Steps to Restoring Lost Data Using the Salesforce Weekly Export” to help admins through this recovery process. One of our customers actually downloaded this eBook to recover using Weekly Export tool. They then called us, never wanting to do that again, and that’s when they became an OwnBackup customer. It is a difficult process normally. It’s extremely difficult with large, complex data sets.
The reason backup and recovery is so much easier with OwnBackup is because our solution takes snapshots of customers’ data environments daily, or in some cases multiple times per day. This enables our solution to automatically compare each snapshot and identify lost or corrupted data. We’re able to identify all data and metadata changes, at the account, object, and field levels. We also have Smart Alerts that alert the customer about any changes in their data that seem abnormal. If the changes are indeed a mistake, the customer can easily leverages OwnBackup to quickly restore just the changed data.
Q: Who are your target customers?
A: OwnBackup is perfect for Fortune 500 companies that have 1,000+ employees. We have a global client base and broad industry appeal, with large concentrations in highly-regulated industries, including Healthcare, Life Sciences, Financial Services, and High Tech.
YP, The Real Yellow Pages, one of Salesforce’s largest customers, came to us with a big challenge. Their massive Salesforce database of 20 Million+ business accounts and 500 million total records took six weeks to backup without OwnBackup. After implementing OwnBackup, YP’s backup time went down to less than 24 hours per backup. This was a significant accomplishment for YP. Plus, with Smart Alerts, YP knows if any significant changes have been made to their data. If data is deleted or corrupted, YP is now able to identify and restore deleted accounts and their relationships in a timely manner. YP has 100 percent data backup and recovery peace of mind with our solution in place to protect their data.
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Q: Can you give us more insights into the solutions OwnBackup provides?
A: OwnBackup is more than a backup service. We offer administrators and developers peace of mind around SaaS data loss and corruption recovery. Our platform provides a comprehensive solution to backup, compare, recover, and manage large, complex SaaS-based data sets.
We also offer a Sandbox Seeding solution, which helps Development and QA teams shorten cycles by configuring and replicating relevant test data sets to sandboxes. Our iterative filter and preview capabilities enable clients to identify the perfect sized-to-fit test data set, which facilitates a more iterative, accurate development testing process.
We recently launched our Winter ‘18 release for our Salesforce solution. This included an Advanced Key Management capability that allows enterprises to submit, rotate, and revoke their own encryption keys for use on their OwnBackup archive.
Q: What’s next for OwnBackup?
A: Our vision for OwnBackup has been to provide a single pane of glass for data protection and management for all the enterprises’ SaaS and PaaS data stored in the cloud. In addition to adding to our SaaS/PaaS data protection and management capabilities, we are very focused on expanding the integrations we offer to support additional core business solutions in the cloud.
In the near future, we have a webinar coming up on building a SaaS data protection strategy, Proactive Salesforce Data Management for the Large Enterprise.
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