Salesforce Storage: Top Things to Know

The success and growth of any enterprise largely depends on the manner in which it collects, stores, retains, accesses and uses the vast amounts of data it generates. Salesforce as a CRM platform has played a pivotal role in the journey of ascent of such enterprises driving innovation, customer success and digital transformation. Salesforce, like any other platform, offers certain in-built storage to its customers where the data that is generated regularly can be held. This is the Salesforce storage, the base of the enterprise’s business.

Types of Salesforce Storage

Internally, Salesforce offers their customers storage options that are segregated into three categories:

• Data Storage- Salesforce data storage allocates dedicated storage space for a company’s accounts, campaigns, cases, contacts, custom objects, data translations, email messages, events, Google docs, leads, notes, orders, solutions, tasks, and all objects tied to Field Service Lightning enablement. Since late March 2019, all Salesforce editions have allocated 10 GB for data storage, plus incrementally added user storage.
• File Storage- Salesforce file storage has allocated storage space for different files in attachments, files home, Salesforce CRM content, Chatter files (including user photos), the Documents tab, and the Site.com assets. Nearly all of the Salesforce editions have allocated 10 GB of file storage per Org whereas only the Essentials edition has been allocated 1 GB of file storage per Org.
• Big Objects Storage- Last is the recently launched Big Data-based storage option termed ‘Big Objects’ that is designed to hold sizable amounts of enterprise data. Nearly all Salesforce editions have allocated storage space for 1 million Big Object records per Salesforce Org. Also worth noting is the fact that purchasing Big Objects is comparatively cheaper than purchasing the additional Salesforce data storage.

Challenges with Salesforce Storage

As a flip side, even Salesforce storage gives rise to several difficulties for the Salesforce admins. One of the major challenges faced by a majority of the enterprises, even when they realize the significance of data for their business success, is the actual collection and storage of a large volume of data as there are various complexities involved. Some of them have been explained below:

• Limited storage space- Virtually all Salesforce editions offer a pre-decided storage space to store the enterprise’s data. This space, though seems ample in the beginning, usually starts to exhaust only after 2–3 years of use, depending on the amount and speed of data generation.
• Potentially high costs- A major chunk of the Salesforce expenditure is the result of the extremely high data storage costs. When the natively allocated storage space runs out, enterprises are left with no option but to purchase the extra storage, which comes at a really expensive price. In most of the cases, this is not a one-time cost due to which the expenditure increases annually.
• Reduced CRM performance- Usually copious amounts of data causes the Salesforce CRM application to become bulky and lowers its efficiency. There are frequent delays in processing information, generating leads, or performing other kinds of operations. This in turn can adversely affect the user experience as well.
• Compliance and governance concerns- Inadequate storage space directly results in data being stored in an unstructured manner due to which the enterprise is not really able to utilize this data to its fullest potential and fails to meet its compliance and governance requirements.

Increasing Salesforce Storage

Having mentioned some of the frequently arising challenges, it only seems fair to enlighten Salesforce users with different ways in which this storage space can be expanded. The easiest means to fulfill the need for more storage are to either increase the storage limit or reduce the storage consumption. Some of the other effective techniques that can be implemented are as follows:

• Purchasing additional storage space or adding new user licenses in Professional, Enterprise, Unlimited, and Performance Salesforce Editions
• Deleting some of the outdated leads or contacts, if possible
• Purging the system data and files of any unnecessary attachments
• Deleting files from the Salesforce CRM Content
• Archiving unnecessary and redundant data into a different storage system

In addition to mentioning all these different options, I also take the liberty to recommend trying out Salesforce Data Archiving for combating the storage issues. DataArchiva is a popular data archiving tool available on Salesforce AppExchange which can help you in moving all the historical and rarely-used but nonetheless important data from the primary data storage space to the Big Data-based Big Objects storage. Through this, Salesforce admins can drastically reduce the storage costs by up to 85%, improve the CRM performance by two times, and boost user experience while ensuring data security and integrity. To know more about this solution, get in touch with us.