Leveraging Salesforce Privacy Center for Efficient Data Archival

Salesforce’s Privacy Center offers a comprehensive solution for data management and archival, ensuring compliance with privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA. The blog discusses key features such as automated data retention, cost savings, and improved system performance. Readers will gain insights into implementing data archival strategies using Salesforce Privacy Center, optimizing storage, and enhancing data retrieval efficiency

Introduction

Data management and privacy are top priorities for companies in all sectors in the current digital era. Organizations need to put strong plans in place for data management and archiving since privacy rights of customers and data protection rules are receiving more attention. Through its Privacy Center, Salesforce, a well-known customer relationship management (CRM) platform, provides a comprehensive solution to assist organizations in effectively managing and archiving their data while complying with privacy rules.

Understanding data archival

Data archival is the process of moving inactive or historical data from primary storage to a secondary storage system for long-term retention. This practice helps organizations optimize their primary storage resources, improve system performance, and ensure compliance with data retention policies and regulations.

Salesforce Privacy Center

Salesforce Privacy Centre is a centralized hub within the Salesforce platform that enables organizations to manage privacy-related tasks efficiently. It provides tools and features to help businesses comply with data privacy regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). One of the key functionalities of the Privacy Centre is its data archival capabilities, which allow organizations to securely archive and manage their data while maintaining compliance with privacy regulations.

Key Features and Benefits

• Automated Data Retention Policies: Salesforce Privacy Center allows organizations to define and implement automated data retention policies based on their specific business requirements and regulatory obligations. These policies can be customized to automatically archive data after a certain period, ensuring compliance with data retention regulations. Granular Data Archival: The Privacy Center enables organizations to archive data at a granular level, allowing them to select specific data objects, fields, or records for archival. This flexibility ensures that only relevant data is archived, optimizing storage resources and simplifying data retrieval processes.
• Granular Data Archival: The Privacy Center enables organizations to archive data at a granular level, allowing them to select specific data objects, fields, or records for archival. This flexibility ensures that only relevant data is archived, optimizing storage resources and simplifying data retrieval processes.
• Cost Savings: By archiving and managing data efficiently using Salesforce Privacy Center, organizations can reduce storage costs associated with maintaining large volumes of inactive or historical data in the primary storage. This can result in direct cost savings related to storage infrastructure and maintenance.
• Enhanced Data Retrieval Efficiency: With a well-architected data archival strategy, retrieving active and relevant data becomes faster and more efficient. Organizations can measure the time saved in data retrieval efficiency and reduced downtime.
• Auditing and Reporting Efficiency: Salesforce Privacy Center provides robust audit trails and compliance reporting features. Archived data stored outside of Salesforce in Heroku's Postgres database can be seen in external object via salesforce connect feature of salesforce. We can easily do query, reporting and further analysis on this data for audit and reporting purpose.
• Compliance Cost Reduction: Non-compliance with data retention regulations can result in substantial fines. Salesforce Privacy Center helps organizations adhere to data privacy regulations by automating retention policies. This can translate into cost savings by avoiding potential legal penalties and regulatory fines.
• Improved System Performance: Archiving data frees up valuable resources within the Salesforce platform, leading to improved system performance and responsiveness. We can measure performance improvements in terms of reduced response times for data queries, faster report generation, and overall system efficiency.

Steps to Implement Data Archival Using Privacy Center

• In the Product Specific Terms sections of your order form, copy the URL for the Privacy Center managed package.
• In Salesforce, replace the path contents at the end of the URL (after Host name) with the path in the link provided. Press Enter.
• Follow the on-screen instructions to install the managed package.
• Be sure to grant access and permission to users according to your company’s policies.
• Click Install. A message describes the progress, and a confirmation message appears after the installation has completed.

Give your admins access to Privacy Center features by assigning a permission set license and permission set to them. With this license, users can create retention and portability policies, manage Right to Be Forgotten requests, and view run logs and Privacy Center schedules. Privacy Center comes with 30 licenses.Process and Store Customer Data with Heroku

Heroku is a container-based cloud platform that acts as a secure data store for Privacy Center’s Data Retention feature. Through its fully managed data service add-ons, Heroku Postgres and Heroku Redis, Heroku helps you move customer data into storage.

To move customer data from Salesforce to Heroku storage, Privacy Center uses a data synchronization service called Heroku Connect. This service replicates your Salesforce data and stores it in one or more dynamic containers called dynos. The dynos are kept in a secure, network-isolated environment called a Private Space. Data services like Postgres and Redis are also installed in the Private Space, so data transfers from Salesforce to Heroku occur within the private network. With this structure, your data isn’t exposed on the public internet, enabling you to meet data governance requirements and keep customer information protected.

The Privacy Center license includes add-on credits that you use to provision Heroku resources for the Data Retention feature.

To use the Data Retention feature, Salesforce automatically allocates you Heroku credits to these resources.

• Postgres Private 6
• Redis Private 7
• Salesforce Connect

These Heroku resources are included with your Privacy Center purchase.

• Heroku Connect—50 million rows
• Heroku Private Space
• 2 private dynos

Set Up Your Private Space

Your Private Space is where your customer information is stored and where data synchronization occurs between Heroku and Salesforce. Work with your Salesforce account team to create your Private Space.

Heroku Connect requires direct user authorization, which makes single sign-on (SSO) authentication incompatible with the connection process. We recommend creating a separate integration user with SSO disabled when connecting your Salesforce org to the Heroku app.

After setting up the Privacy Center, you will see Privacy Center App in salesforce and from there you can create policy/rule for the object/s you want to archive. You can define frequency on which these policies should run. You can decide whether you want to retain data in salesforce or delete when the policy runs. It also gives option to mask data/ encrypt data for security purpose.

Below are some sneak peak form Salesforce setup:

Conclusion

Salesforce's Privacy Center provides a comprehensive solution for businesses seeking to manage data privacy and archival efficiently. By leveraging its features, organizations can not only comply with privacy regulations but also optimize their CRM system for improved performance and security.References

References

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLXyQD7J3uo

https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.set_up_privacy_center_and_connect_to_heroku.htm&type=5

https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=release-notes.rn_security_privacy_center.htm&release=246&type=5