Spanning Enhances Salesforce Data Protection Solution
Spanning Cloud Apps, a provider of cloud-based data protection, has launched major enhancements to Spanning Backup for Salesforce, including automated metadata restore of 10 metadata types within and between organizations using software from Salesforce.com.
With Spanning Backup for Salesforce, companies can reduce the risk of data and metadata loss by automating backup and restoration of critical Salesforce data and metadata.
Spanning Backup for Salesforce delivers daily, automated backups of an organization's Salesforce environment, including record data, files, chatter posts, and metadata (customizations). Once backed up, Spanning provides multiple ways to restore data directly back into the production environment or across environments. Users can, for example, seed a sandbox with metadata and record data so developers can start on new projects, according to Mat Hamlin, vice president of products at Spanning.
The Metadata Restore feature is the biggest part of the new release. With it, users can compare and recover metadata that was lost due to accidental or intentional deletions.
"Without a direct restore option for metadata, tasks as simple as recovering a previous version of an important report would require that backups of metadata were available, and then having to use complex tools like Force.com IDE or Force.com CLI and building packages to deploy metadata. These are not tasks that all admins are comfortable performing and definitely not operations typically performed by business users," Hamlin says. "With Spanning's Metadata Restore functionality, customers can just click a few buttons to recover metadata without using external tools or having deep technical knowledge.
"Customers can also use the Metadata Restore functionality to deploy Metadata items across Salesforce orgs, such as from Production to Sandboxes or from one Production org to another," he adds. "When admins or developers are trying to build sandboxes for development/testing between refresh cycles, restoring metadata and data between two different instances is required, and Spanning now makes it easy to accomplish that quickly."
Beyond this latest announcement, Spanning has expanded its restore operations over the past four years to include specific workflows for common use cases. These include the following:
- On-page, single object restores that allow users to undo the mistakes they make during normal business operations;
- Bulk restore of production data, including automatically restoring all child records that were removed with a cascade delete;
- Restoration of specific fields to correct a mistake without overwriting potentially good data;
- Overwriting specific field values during restoration, for recovering records owned by inactive users and when restoring records that do not have a value for a newly added required field;
- Metadata compare and restore, allowing rapid recovery of key Salesforce customizations, like Reports, Dashboards, Triggers and Object Definitions; and
- Seeding Sandboxes, so users can set up environments to preset states and begin developing and testing new features. Spanning also includes the option to anonymize specific field values that developers or contractors should not see.
Spanning's Backup for Salesforce has already been adopted by more than 700 organizations around the world, including Adidas, Beam Suntory, Men's Wearhouse, and Rainforest Alliance.
"We're continuing to see rapid growth in the adoption of [software-as-a-service] applications in the enterprise. This mirrors Gartner's prediction that by 2025, 55 percent of large enterprises will successfully implement an all-in cloud SaaS strategy," Hamlin maintains. "Spanning's mission is to help those companies protect data as they move to the cloud, including those who have already made the move to Salesforce for CRM or service/support teams, and to Office 365 or G Suite for their productivity suite. Data loss doesn't have to be a disaster."