Situation: 

The IATA team has been utilizing Salesforce for 20 years with the aim to provide certifications and other services to accredited travel and cargo agencies. Salesforce is therefore mainly applied for customer service purposes for which the Service Cloud is used. Digital transformation, consisting of  many apps including Salesforce, is at the core of IATA’s strategy. Data is the backbone of their operations, driving efficiency, safety, customer satisfaction, compliance, and financial performance. Protecting this data is equally critical to upholding privacy, preventing cyber threats, ensuring legal compliance, maintaining operational continuity, and sustaining trust within the aviation ecosystem. 

Challenge/Pain Points: 

● Preventing data loss: The Salesforce team wanted to prevent data loss but required  additional know-how to make it happen. They needed an advanced backup and restore  tool to track what data had been corrupted or lost. All data was stored in one place and  accessing data even if something were to happen to the CRM was more  important than ever. 

● Manual Development Processes were Time-Consuming 

Creating new Salesforce environments for developers in a ready-to-use format was too manual and time-consuming and led to many human errors due to missing relationship dependencies. Since every project needs different types of data,  relationships needed to be revised every time.

Developers spent  significant  time fixing errors and bugs in this process. As a result, they didn’t have enough time to focus on enhancing the tools. 

As the initial set-up was too demanding the dev environments were not refreshed as often as needed to prevent disruption in the development lifecycle. 

● Exceeding data capacity 

○ Having accumulated data for over 20 years, there was an urgent need to manage this data growth and to ensure that all end-users still have access to legacy data. One of the other challenges was the fact that they reached their capacity storage. They even went over, which resulted in the system to slow down. 

○ IATA had a lot of legacy data in-house. They had an in-house program to archive legacy data, but it wasn’t efficient. A lot of data was being accumulated on Salesforce and they needed an archiving solution to manage data moving forward. 

Solution/Impact: 

● Proactively identify critical data and assess risks and the ability to recover from a data loss with one click 

Own’s backup and recovery solution, Own Recover, allowed the team to easily identify some unexpected change or data loss but also investigate why it may have happened. Not only did the IATA Salesforce team know when and how data was lost and corrupted but they could also restore it in a few clicks. The restore functionality allowed them to compare between two versions, review all the data that had been corrupted, investigate why it had been corrupted and precisely restore the data that was needed. This helped  them to never have a business disruption. Even if they lose data, they can recover it and the team can keep on working. 

● Seed faster and more accurately 

For the data seeding aspect, with every project the development team started, they needed to create a sandbox for developers. They rely completely  on Own for this. Without it, they would use a lot of time to simulate the process. 

The team uses over 100 sandbox environments and  refresh them  every month. Every two months,  new data sets are transferred from production to sandbox. They also have an anonymization template and processes, so it’s easy for developers to use the tool. 

● Keep the data anonymized throughout the development cycle 

the speed at which IATA developers can build a development org and the fact that they can anonymize data when they want to run a development means they can protect sensitive data, which is a key factor as well.

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● Moving legacy data to Own archive 

Plenty of emails, messages, case management, and objects consumed most of IATA’s storage. They slowly moved legacy data to Own Archive, which  effectively and smoothly allowed the team to work only  with necessary data and, therefore, avoided performance slow down. 

All three solutions are very intuitive, and it seemed the most complete data protection and security solution for the IATA team to use.

The Results/The Bottom Line: 

● First, it allows IATA to innovate quicker and  save a large amount of time. Before, they were using Excel sheets to create relationships between data and building their own steps. Creating templates with Own data seeding by selecting the object while keeping the parent/ child relationship is priceless. They have an environment where the team can focus on coding,  not  other time-consuming tasks. 

● Second, they have the peace of mind while working as they are sure they will always have access to data. 

●  they remain compliant, and the org speed is good and not bloated with data that they are not using anymore. 

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