Veeam Backup for Salesforce seeks to protect user data
Veeam's Backup for Salesforce enters a market that has become busier in the last couple of years. Its features include comparison of data and metadata.
Following its Microsoft Office 365 backup product, Veeam will launch Backup for Salesforce, one of the other top SaaS platforms.
CTO Danny Allan said he expects Veeam Backup for Salesforce to be available, at least in beta, by the end of the year.
"Salesforce is the next opportunity in the SaaS space," Allan said.
Veeam seeks to simplify Salesforce backup and restore
Allan said the product is based on Veeam's own experiences of backing up Salesforce for several years.
Danny Allan
Users will be able to back up in the cloud and on premises. On the recovery side, Veeam Backup for Salesforce will have flexible and granular search and restore of data records, metadata, attachments and files, Allan said. It will also include data and metadata comparison.
At first glance, the product is designed to deliver on the "Veeam mantra of usability and completeness," said Christophe Bertrand, a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).
"Based on previous efforts for other SaaS environments, we expect a strong first version, quickly followed by enhancements," Bertrand said.
Backup for Salesforce was next on the list after Office 365 in terms of customer requests, Allan said. Veeam's Backup for Microsoft Office 365 is on version 5 and has been downloaded more than 175,000 times.
Prior to Veeam Backup for Salesforce, Veeam's customers could use publicly available APIs to export data from Salesforce and then use the Data Loader to manually restore.
"This could prove to be a very cumbersome, complex and potentially error-prone process," Allan said. "With Veeam Backup for Salesforce, we make the entire process simple, flexible and reliable."
With Veeam Backup for Salesforce, users can regularly schedule data protection. Two primary users for the product will be the backup administrator responsible for compliance and ensuring data protection, and the Salesforce admin in charge of data management and manipulation of Salesforce data, Allan said.
Salesforce has always been very supportive of third-party data protection.
Danny AllanCTO, Veeam
"Salesforce has always been very supportive of third-party data protection," Allan said.
The CRM provider notes on its website that there are a number of backup products offered by its partners on the AppExchange. SaaS providers like Salesforce are typically responsible for their platforms, while users are responsible for their data.
"It's your data," Allan said.
There are many technical dimensions to consider, such as governor limits, workload parallelization, sandboxing and scale, said Vinny Choinski, senior lab analyst at ESG.
Several products on the market provide backup for Salesforce, including Backupify, CloudAlly, Commvault's Metallic, Druva, Odaseva, OwnBackup and Spanning.
In addition, about a year after shutting down its Data Recovery Service, which it later restored, Salesforce announced its new native Backup and Restore product will hit the market soon. Functions include native backup of Salesforce data, retention policies for those copies and restore back into Salesforce.
Salesforce's new native backup product elevates awareness of the need for that data protection, Allan said.
Some organizations don't understand or recognize that SaaS platforms such as Microsoft 365 and Salesforce need data protection.
"We think that there is plenty of room in the market for Salesforce backup and recovery solutions since many end users still need education on the topic, and need to bridge the SaaS disconnect we have identified in our research," Bertrand said.
"We suspect that while the Salesforce module will in time provide a strong starting point, many organizations will be looking at additional capabilities and taking a more unified data protection approach by leveraging a solution like Veeam."
Enterprise Strategy Group is a division of TechTarget.
Danny Allan
