Navigating salesforce downtime: insights and strategies for preparedness
Today, there is an unheard-of amount of reliance on data and technology, making an occasional Salesforce outage a true nightmare for businesses since it could lead to a complete service failure. So it makes sense to plan ahead for a service disruption in order to withstand it with the fewest possible losses. Our Salesforce support specialists are prepared to explain what the 99.9% uptime statistic means, the effects of Salesforce downtime on businesses, the distinction between scheduled and unplanned downtime, and more.
All CIOs are interested in obtaining a SLA as a guarantee of continuous system operation because they want to know what to anticipate from their Salesforce support providers. Although five nines, or 99.999% availability, is the ideal, very few service providers will be able to deliver that. However, it appears that clients have nothing against the 99.9% statistic, which means that there is only a 0.1% downtime. unless you do the arithmetic, it sounds impressive. A service level of 99% uptime indicates that the yearly average downtime will be 87 hours 40 minutes, whereas a pipe dream of 99.999% is 5 minutes 26 seconds, and every year we have 8 hours 46 minutes of downtime because of 99.9% uptime. Consequently, before executing a SLA, it is essential to know your company will be left with service down for hours.
Salesforce has created a Master Subscription Agreement but does not bind itself to one except in circumstances where one has been properly negotiated. It states that the service provider will “use commercially reasonable efforts to make the online Services available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.” This is an ambiguous pledge. A community page with real-time information on system performance and security is supplied by the vendor, who also claims to have a proven reliability record of 99.9+% uptime for years.
What Kinds of System Downtime Exist?
There is a lesser of two evils even if nobody loves to be idle.
To maintain the system’s dependable operation, maintenance, or planned downtime, is a required and unavoidable practice. There is a schedule for planned downtime, and backup plans are made. Customers receive a heads-up and updates as work progresses.
An unanticipated system error, a case of force majeure, or a hacker attack cause unplanned downtime or failure. This is a catastrophe that will probably have broad effects.
Since Salesforce is the top CRM system and sales automation program, its availability is crucial to the operations of many businesses, and unanticipated Salesforce outages invariably lead to a loss of income.
Facing system failure at downtime:
Downtime is becoming more and more unwelcome in the age of the always-on business, whether it is caused by malfunction or maintenance. 1. Although planned downtime, often known as maintenance, is still unpopular, it is seen as an essential and inevitable practice to upgrade, test, and/or repair the system to ensure its dependable and optimal operation. It is less likely to seriously harm the workflow because planned downtime is scheduled and comes after previous notification. For instance, for its users to arrange their operations appropriately, Salesforce makes information about its maintenance windows available. But the times could alter at the vendor’s exclusive discretion.
Failure, often known as unplanned downtime, can be brought on by system errors, uncontrollable circumstances, or hacker attacks. In contrast to maintenance, it has much greater risks because users are not informed in advance and are not prepared for interruptions. Although Salesforce assures its clients’ data retention in such circumstances, many users may find the entire process to be abhorrent.
Evaluate the impact of Salesforce downtime on business Read more on Business.
Salesforce, which is used to centralize data, is commonly regarded as the only place where marketing, sales, and customer service can turn to when they have questions about campaigns, leads, accounts, contacts, opportunities, quotations, deals, analytics, and more. As a result, these departments are directly affected if the system is down. Due to the direct connection between Salesforce and business processes, a lack of access to its capabilities causes workflow to halt, resulting in a temporary halt in corporate activities and delays in customer communications. Higher costs, unsatisfied clients, reputational damage, lost productivity, and the inability to meet legal requirements are the repercussions of this. Even worse if it occurs during core service hours, thousands of dollars’ worth of financial harm will result in this scenario.
Salesforce support specialists and business divisions should create an emergency plan because a system outage is more likely to occur when than if. We suggest that the following be included in this plan: Create a communication strategy in advance. This will enable all parties affected by an incident to stay informed about it and avoid being alarmed. Users will feel more at ease about the situation and be less likely to overreact if you explain to them the specifics of a shutdown and your expectations for the system recovery. Plan your data backup and recovery strategy. In addition to real-time replication to disk at each data center, Salesforce performs data replication in close to real-time between the production data center and the disaster recovery data center. However, manual backup is suggested because the Salesforce Data Recovery service is an expensive choice.
When a vendor is trying to protect their own interests in the event of a system failure, a client should look for measures to reduce any potential drawbacks. Salesforce’s Master Subscription Agreement places important restrictions on the provider’s liability: Only for their own service, Salesforce makes uptime guarantees. The agreement has nothing to do with your software application’s unavailability, which might occur because of users at your company’s fault. Salesforce typically just promises service availability, not service quality. This indicates that even though your software application’s quality and, consequently, user experience, have declined, it may still be accessible. The sales team may lose opportunities and, as a result, revenue if Salesforce is not down but is simply delayed.
Data security may be completely managed with on-premises CRM systems like Microsoft Dynamics 365 on-premises. Contrary to cloud deployment, where data is stored on faraway servers, the organization retains control of its data, especially sensitive data like that pertaining to health. To manage all the gear and software and safeguard it against IT equipment failure, UPS battery failure, or an unintentional error, you need a staff of system administrators and programmers if you decide to host an on-premises data center.
Five Steps for Unplanned Downtime with Salesforce
Create a communication strategy in advance: This will enable all parties affected by an incident to stay informed about it and avoid being alarmed. Users will feel more at ease about the situation and be less likely to overreact if you explain to them the specifics of a shutdown and your expectations for the system recovery.
Create a plan for data backup and recovery: Salesforce performs near real-time data replication between the production data center and the disaster recovery data center, as well as real-time replication to disk at each data center. However, since the Salesforce Data Recovery service is an expensive and time-consuming procedure, manual backup is advised.
Create a plan for continuity: Businesses that rely on systems like Salesforce must have a business continuity plan in place to keep running in the event of a system failure. This comprises syncing the tasks and calendar on Salesforce with Office365, Exchange, or Google Apps. Nevertheless, having a backup of the data will be exceedingly challenging because, for the majority of businesses utilizing the technology, Salesforce has taken over as the system of record. After all, the whole idea of a firm using the platform in the first place was to avoid hosting its own data.
Recognize your risk: Recognize from away that downtime can occur with any application you use. It’s crucial to have a plan in place for how your team will handle downtime and how to communicate when it occurs. Some people liken this to having a family disaster plan. Until we actually sit down and consider what we would do in the event of a tragedy, the majority of us believe that we have a plan. Then we realize that not everyone is on the same page. The same strategy should be used by your company when Salesforce is unavailable. Decide how to manage the situation before you are faced with downtime. Recognize the risks that could arise from downtime and take the necessary precautions.
Become a support center member: Since bad customization might result in downtime, it makes sense to select and sign up with a reputable Salesforce support providers who will assist in removing unwanted effects as they having team of Salesforce support specialists who can correctly customize the platform in accordance with the demands of the business.
