Salesforce org merges can increase efficiency, improve visibility, enhance security, and reduce costs. That said, an org consolidation is a complex process that involves aligning multiple business processes, reconciling data, and ensuring the final system meets all operational requirements. Automation can streamline and accelerate this process, providing several key benefits, including:
As these advantages are essential to achieving operational excellence, we explore them in more depth below.
Salesforce org merges can be labor intensive when performed manually. Beyond the hours involved, unforeseen complications due to human error can cause costly delays.
Automation accelerates the process, ensuring the project stays on track and within budget. This results in clear financial advantages due to reduced overhead costs and a much lower chance of cost overruns.
Along with immediate cost savings, automation also enables resource optimization, which delivers additional value. With minimal manual labor required, your employees can redirect their focus towards more strategic initiatives. As a result, you can derive more value from your team, which further boosts ROI.
Relying on manual data migration for your org merge can put your business continuity in jeopardy. It brings with it a high potential for human error, which can introduce bugs into your Salesforce instance, potentially causing operational downtime. This brings with it the threat of revenue loss and eroded customer trust.
Data migration automation is a robust solution that ensures your critical businesses aren’t interrupted during an org consolidation. Because it eliminates error-prone manual work, it minimizes the chances of issues and downtime. Consequently, your operations keep running efficiently, smoothly, and predictably.
Manual data migration doesn’t just threaten business continuity—it also poses a security risk. During an org merge, large volumes of data—for example, PII, PHI, or sensitive financial data—are first exported out of the Salesforce cloud and downloaded to the employee’s desktop. This amplifies the risk of data loss or a data breach, which would likely have adverse business consequences.
Automation for desktop-free data migration ensures that sensitive information is transferred securely without ever leaving the Salesforce platform, eradicating the vulnerabilities of manual data deployment.
Moreover, automated data migration provides robust data protection features such as data masking and data obfuscation that can be enabled before deploying. So even if an unauthorized individual gains access to the data, they can’t read it. This boosts your security posture and safeguards the integrity and confidentiality of sensitive data.
When it comes to merging orgs with complex configuration data, automated version control is another risk-reduction feature. It streamlines the deployment process and acts as a safeguard in the event an issue arises during the merge. Your team can simply roll back the latest deployment, restore the previous version of the application, and address the issue in an isolated environment where it won’t impact operations.
Financial regulations like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, commonly referred to as SOX, are critical for pre-IPO businesses and public companies. Similarly, data protection and privacy laws apply across numerous sectors and for all forms of businesses. The legal, financial, reputational, and business implications of noncompliance with any of these requirements can be far reaching.
Manually meeting the documentation requirements for internal controls is often challenging, time consuming, and costly. Nonetheless, it has to be done well to minimize friction between your staff and external auditors and to meet auditors’ timelines.
Automation for compliance provides a high degree of transparency and makes the audit process exponentially easier. It automatically documents the specifics of every change you make to configurations for the org consolidation so you can instantly generate an audit report on demand.The data protection features of automation also ensure compliance with regulations like CCPA, GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC-II that limit the access of sensitive data to authorized users. Being able to simply toggle a button to turn these features on during an org merge minimizes your staff’s stress and virtually eliminates your risk of noncompliance.
Leveraging automation for your org merge is essential to optimizing efficiency, ensuring business continuity, reducing risk, and enhancing compliance. By using it, you can position yourself for success and ensure your Salesforce instance remains robust, compliant, and efficient as you grow.
How do SOX regulations pertain to org merges in Salesforce?
When merging orgs, public companies still need to comply with SOX regulations for financial reporting. Ensure any changes or migration of financial data are performed compliantly, and leverage automation to document those changes for auditing purposes. Learn more about SOX regulations in Salesforce change management.
Are there other strategies beside automation that I can employ to ensure business continuity during an org merge?
Before the merge, conduct extensive pre-merge testing, establish a robust backup process, and appoint a dedicated support team to address real-time issues. Perform the merge during off-peak hours or even over the weekend, and implement a phased rollout, where you execute the merge in stages.
What is data obfuscation?
Data obfuscation involves disguising sensitive PII, PHI, or financial data to ensure its protection. Obfuscation makes the data unintelligible and unusable for unauthorized users, but it’s still functional for legitimate business purposes.
The gold standard for documenting SOX in Salesforce CPQ!
