A customer relationship management system contains a large amount of information that is considered important for your business. Safeguarding this data is important for ensuring that your company’s business assets are protected further. This also promises that the data doesn’t get lost because of any system crashes and hardware failures.
A CRM backup can often include paying attention to factors such as corporate policy requirements; ISO certification or a SOC II audit, data migration, human factors, integration errors, malicious intents, cloud app failure, etc. If these factors are paid attention and the right strategies are adopted then the CRM backup is successful.
In this blog, we will see some of the proven ways to back up your CRM data. Keep reading to know more.
Types of Backup Strategies:
More often than not, there are two major ways of backing up the CRM data. The first way is manual and the second way is advanced automated backup with a third party vendor. The best CRMs available in the market enable users to export their data in different formats such as Excel, Google Sheets, PDF, CSV, etc.
Commonly, many people use manual backup because it helps in preserving the database and attaching files in a local storage system. It can be easily considered as a valid backup method but the fact is that it comes with many drawbacks sometimes. Some of them are mentioned below.
Not Reliable: One of the key problems that may come with a manual backup is the fact that the operating system of your PC or laptop can actually crash and the hard disk or SSD can also become damaged. The manual backup can lead to instability and restore the data in the future. In case your computer equipment gets stolen, the CRM data can also get into someone else’s hands.
Lost Relationship In Tables: Many CRM platforms enable you to export the tables separately. You may have deals, contacts, and other tables extracted but restoring these tables with relations can become a real challenge.
Not Seeing Changes: This is not so much of an easy task when it comes to comparing what was changed between two different flat files and it is very difficult to compare the stored file data with the records of a CRM table.
Inconvenient User Experience: The manual data extraction may be simple but data restoration can be challenging. There is a need to map each column of a flat file with the column in the CRM table each time you are running the restoration. In addition, you may also have to restore the table even if you have a few records in the CRM.
On the other hand, there is a better way of doing the backup. All companies are interested in maintaining a level of operational efficiency. Working with a cloud-to-cloud backup and recovering can make sure that the data that is stored gets secured but is also accessible in all circumstances. At the time when you are setting up a backup strategy, it is very important to keep a few things in mind.
Backup Plan: To begin with, you have to make an audit of a CRM and corporate policy. It is best to consider moving the CRM data to the cloud because the cloud data is more secure from physical damages such as power outages.
Storage: You can launch an audit to find out how much of the data is present in the CRM and even see how many monthly records can be added.
Schedule: When you are choosing a backup method, you should also set up a backup schedule that can suit your business needs and data changes. There should be a schedule that can determine how often and when you are backing up the CRM data. Further, data frequency, importance, and volume are also important factors to be considered. Remember if your CRM data is changing frequently then you may have to backup often because high-value data needs to be backed up frequently.
Cost: Another point is to compare the budget with all possible vendor offerings to make sure that you are choosing a tool that comes with the best price-to-quality ratio.
Support: It is important to choose the right vendor on the basis of the kind of support that you may need in the future. Some solutions include free support services and many others can charge a fixed rate for almost each ticket.
End-to-end Protection: It is also important to check if the backup comes with industry-leading security and in case it completely aligns with the security policy.
Simple Implementation: You must consider a solution that is capable of immediate results and with no extra costs.
Selected Vendor: You should launch at least one test backup and one restore command. You can simulate a data loss and even restore the deleted record back to the CRM.
Backup Report: At the end, you also need a backup report for evaluating the performance and outcome of backup and restore processes. A backup report is a document that can effectively summarize and analyze the backup and restore activities including date, time, duration, size, status, errors, and other changes. It should effectively summarize all problems, verify results, and even monitor the trends.
To ensure an automated and effective data backup with the best security, it is advisable to use Zoho CRM with Skyvia. You can also configure your Zoho CRM backup within a couple of minutes without any software installation and restore the data from the web browser immediately.
Why You Should Backup Zoho CRM?
Although SaaS companies such as Zoho work to care about data safety extensively data in cloud-based applications can be lost for many other reasons as well. Often, an employee can delete important data and even overwrite it many times.
Data can get lost because of someone’s malicious activity and sometimes even cancelled account subscriptions. Hence, backing up important cloud data is as important for businesses as it is backing up on-premises data.
Using Skyvia proves to be one of the most reliable methods for Zoho CRM backup. It helps in starting the CRM backup and reducing an organization’s downtime when it comes to data losses. You can have your Zoho CRM data available even when the Zoho CRM account is inaccessible or the Zoho CRM subscription gets cancelled.
Some of the reasons why you should back up your Zoho CRM account with Skyvia are mentioned below.
Simple Backup Configuration: You can configure the Zoho CRM backup within a couple of minutes and a convenient GUI.
Automatic Backup: You can set it up once and not worry about any potential data losses anymore.
Efficient Backup: The tool helps in backing up large data volumes at a quick rate. The backup speed is limited only by Zoho CRM API.
Manual Backup: You can backup your CRM data whenever it is needed even before import or mass update operations.
100% Cloud: There is no need for any installation, infrastructure, or maintenance. You can access it from anywhere with just a browser.
Find Data Easily: When you have to find a record that you wish to restore quickly, the powerful search can help in do this within a few seconds. You can navigate to find the older and newer versions until the main version that you wish to restore comes.
Easy Browsing of Data: When you see backed-up data in the browser, you can navigate to the data in old and new snapshots. For every record, you can see the related records and also navigate up and down the hierarchy.
Monitor Changes: You can monitor and even control the way in which data in the Zoho CRM gets changed at a glance. You can quickly see the number of records that get changed in every snapshot since the previous one and also compare the snapshots to see more details.
Enterprise Level Security:
The backups are secured and encrypted in Azure GRS and you are the one who has access to data. The backup of CRM done by Skyvia offers enterprise-grade security.
Strong Encryption: The data can be encrypted with enterprise-grade AES 256-bit encryption and separate keys for every user. When in transit, it is encrypted with a TLS end-to-end encryption with at least 128-bit keys.
Hosted in Azure: The backups get stored in Azure cloud and Microsft ensures that the customers get the best security and protection for their data. The security is built into the Azure platform.
Compliance: Skyvia is also compliant with the European Union’s Global Data Protection Regulation. Further, it complies with the HIPAA requirements for Protected Health Information and is PCI DSS compliant as well.
Zoho CRM Restore:
The backup helps in recovering the Zoho CRM accounts, leads, invoices, contacts, and more at a quick rate without any need for third-party tools. To make sure that the data gets restored from the backup, all you have to do is select the data required to get restored and click the Restore button. The Zoho CRM restore can be done following the below-mentioned tricks.
Bulk Restoration: You can quickly restore all the backed-up data or all records from cloud objects.
Granular Restoration: You can also restore separate records and even field values of modified records.
Undoing Changes: You can compare the snapshots for different dates and even see the data differences. Select and undo all changes.
Restore Relations: You can browse the relations, and choose and restore multiple records from different objects just so that the relations between them gets restored.
Restore to Another Account: You can simply choose to restore the backed-up data to a Zoho CRM account other than the one you backed up from.
Conclusion:
CRM data is important for business success as it helps in understanding the customers, improving sales and marketing, and delivering better customer service. That said, CRM data can often be vulnerable to many risks such as accidental deletion, theft, corruption, and sometimes even ransomware. It is for this reason that CRM backup is important. In case you have been interested in getting a backup for your CRM then you need expert consultants to ensure that your plan is implemented effectively. Encap has consultants who can promise effective results to you when it comes to the implementation of an effective CRM backup. Get in touch with the Zoho Consulting Team to know more.
