Salesforce Super Fragile

This is one of the biggest outage for Salesforce due to a script deployed just before 10AM PT May 17, according to the company’s event dashboard. Finally Salesforce is super fragile. Obviously, questions around service availability, data durability and business impact are open.

The feeling is not very good as the downtime lasted 15 hours and 8 minutes that means 99.827% availability on an annualized base which is very very weak and unacceptable for such service from a vendor like Salesforce. Even some other support and maintenance web pages at Salesforce mentioned a longer downtime. Sales Cloud and Service Cloud were affected mostly in Europe and North America.

This faulty script have given read and write permissions so data have been exposed and were at risk and restoring the access is not enough, you will need to rollback to consistent trusted data sets if they’re available. Of course, the question of the RPO is key here. And what about info leakage ?

Beyond the availability issue of the service, the data protection is the second one. According to Salesforce support page, backup is scheduled weekly or monthly based on the Salesforce edition and the company invites users to consider third-party solution. For an IaaS vendor, it could be acceptable, for a SaaS vendor, it’s not. As users subscribes to a SaaS service, they shouldn’t have to worry about data protection and application uptime. This is just a scandal.

The only possibility to avoid data loss is to implement a CDP approach and the majority of users didn’t make such data protection choice.

We hope it will invite the software giant to reconsider its position and even if the failure root was identified, it doesn’t excuse, replace and repair anything. It could also create a serious call to action for Salesforce to think about developing a serious solution or even acquiring a compelling player such as CloudAlly, Backupify, Druva, Odaseva, OwnBackup, Veritas or Spanning. The latter is no longer available as Kaseya bought it end of 2018 and has not desire to sell it.

Her is a recently update of SaaS backup solutions for SaaS applications that should be considered seriously.

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