Backupify Releases a Service for Salesforce.com Data
Backupify, a cloud-based backup service provider, has introduced Snapshot for Salesforce CRM, a limited one-time backup service for data stored within a company's Salesforce CRM account.
This early beta release precedes a full Salesforce backup solution scheduled for release later this year.
During the beta period, Snapshot for Salesforce is available only to Salesforce Unlimited and Salesforce Enterprise subscribers. It will let Salesforce administrators get a complete download of their Salesforce account data, including all attachments and critical data objects, at any time. Backupify ensures that businesses can access and control the data they entrust to Salesforce.com and prevents data loss from external threats, user error, service failure, hacking, or malicious deletion.
Rob Stevens, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Backupify, calls the Snapshot for Salesforce application "a starting point for us" and promises more functionality in the full version to be released in a few months.
The more feature-rich, full-service Salesforce CRM backup service will provide increased data management capabilities for businesses moving valuable data to the cloud, including regularly scheduled backups with no user intervention. It will also make backed up data readily available for search and retrieval.
The files that Backupify creates can be downloaded and stored on site or stored in the cloud on the Amazon hosted platform. For the on-premises option, the amount of storage needed depends on the amount of data and the number of users involved. All files are compressed into a .zip format for lower storage requirements.
According to Stevens, the Snapshot for Salesforce application came about as a result of customer requests. "We asked our customers what business applications they wanted, and the most common request was for Salesforce," he says. "They are a leader in cloud applications and have a lot of customers."
More than 100,000 organizations now use Salesforce.com business applications and platforms. "They're not worried about Salesforce losing their data, but they want a backup in case of user error or malicious deletion," Stevens says. "It's just precautionary. It's always a good idea to have a backup."
With Snapshot for Salesforce CRM, should critical information be deleted or rendered inaccessible, network administrators can restore the account in a matter of minutes.
Creating the application required a loose partnership with Salesforce.com, which gave Backupify access to its application programming interface, according to Stevens.
Backupify already offered a product that could extract all of the Gmail, Google Docs, Calendar, Contacts, and Sites content from Google accounts, convert the data into usable formats, compress it into zip files, and download it to a local machine. Other backup services are available for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Zoho, Picasa, Flickr, and several other cloud-based applications.
Backupify, in a blog post earlier this week, acknowledged that Salesforce.com already offers its users an option to download data. What makes Backupify's service different, it says, is that users can download their Salesforce data as often as they like through an on-demand model; select which Salesforce objects to download, and password protect their Salesforce downloads.
"We expect this to be a great value to our customers," Stevens says. "Our goal is to give companies greater control over their data and reduce the risks to their business."