Spanning Automates Daily Backup Within Salesforce.com

Spanning Cloud Apps, Inc. announced the availability of Spanning Backup for Salesforce in the Salesforce AppExchange.

In limited beta since November, it is the an ‘in-app’ backup product, delivered through the Salesforce user interface, to monitor backups and recover lost data. It provides a cloud-to-cloud approach for automated backup and, with the Salesforce Spring ’14 release, it will integrate with Chatter to proactively alert admins to backup status and export activity. 

In addition to launching the backup solution, the company has joined the Salesforce ISV force program and is the only cloud-to-cloud backup provider that is part of this program. It was recognized as providing value to users and will be sold through the Salesforce.com direct sales channel.

Salesforce’s backup policy includes daily snapshots of their customers’ data, which protects against data loss, but it does not provide ways to recover lost data. Recovery is a service provided by Salesforce that can take weeks and cost thousands of dollars. This leaves companies with a difficult decision when data loss occurs. Salesforce also offers users the ability to export all of their data on a weekly basis; however, the manual nature of the approach is costly and error-prone. Having an automated daily backup ensures that changes to data are captured frequently, minimizing the chance for error, and reducing the costs and complexity of backup.

“Salesforce administrators, who are often responsible for backup and recovery, tend to work solely in Salesforce and prefer to manage, monitor and use integrated applications that leverage the capabilities and security provided by Salesforce,” said Jeff Erramouspe, CEO, Spanning Cloud Apps. “We’ve received great feedback from our beta customers, who have praised our fully integrated user experience. Salesforce users expect transparency in knowing exactly what is and is not being backed up and we make it easy for them to monitor this both for compliance and peace of mind.“

Salesforce manages corporate data, including customer details, sales, marketing and financials, for more than 100,000 organizations. With this product providing automated daily backups, customers have a way to protect data, files and customizations. Additionally, the solution allows users to recover lost data from any previous backup.

Features:

• Automated daily backups: Cloud-to-cloud backup of Salesforce data improves backup reliability and reduces the time it takes administrators to manage the backup process;

• Reporting of backup results:  Admins can monitor the status of backups, including the configuration changes and any errors or warnings that may need attention;

• Monitor and control API usage:  Monitor and control the number of API calls used by Spanning Backup each day;

• Point-in-time data recovery: Navigate to any previous version of data and recover specific object types or all items through granular exports;

• Chatter feeds for backup status and activity monitoring: Provides real-time progress updates for admins of backups and exports directly in Chatter newsfeeds (available with the Salesforce Spring ’14 release).

“When migrating business data and processes to a cloud application like Salesforce, organizations must consider the protection of their data and their ability to quickly recover data when necessary,” said Jason Buffington, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Too often, SaaS providers focus more on availability of the service, but not always the protection and retention of the data. Considering how many organizations rely on Salesforce – including ESG – it is exciting to see Spanning bring this offering to market.“

Available to customers in the Salesforce AppExchange. The product will be sold with a $30 per-user, per-year subscription with unlimited storage.

Read also:
Spanning cloud Apps Expands Backup and Recovery to Salesforce.com
Daily backup, chatter integration, point in time recovery