Background
The client was a fast-growing communications and web conferencing company in the US with a global market presence and direct as well as channel partner sales. The company has been experiencing rapid growth, further accelerated by Covid-related demand. They had a very large and complex Salesforce org that covered sales, service, CPQ and communities.
Problem
The nature of business and transactions were such that the company was quickly running out of storage in Salesforce and hitting their limits. They desperately needed a solution that would be scalable.
One immediate need was to archive a vast number of legacy account and contact records that were free trial accounts created over time. These, which came to around 8 lakh records, needed to be archived to declutter their instance.
Solution
- The Lister team evaluated multiple options and decided to go with an archival solution using Big Objects in Salesforce to store the archived records.
- We created Big Objects and wrote a generic batch program that would make a copy of actual records, archive them in Big Objects and delete the records in Salesforce.
- We came up with a generic data archival framework implement Big Objects consisting of the following,
- Determined how much and where all the data of the organization was stored
- Identified the amount of data that was held in Salesforce and how close was it to the storage limits.
- Brought the data owners and the legal team of the organisation together and got the relevant information about the content of the data
- Categorized data in terms of importance and need for retrieval
- Classified the data stored and defined a configurable set of rules on data to be stored, deleted, or archived
Outcomes
- We successfully archived all the old accounts and contacts based on pre-defined rules
- The archival solution could now be scaled up to handle billions of records
- The solution was flexible and configurable to handle any object in Salesforce and store data based on rules
- The solution addressed the challenges of storage the company was facing not just for now, but for the future as well.