Salesforce Data Migration: The Roadmap on How to Migrate Data to Salesforce

Salesforce data migration is the process of transferring or moving data from one Salesforce instance to another or from a different system or platform to Salesforce.

In this article, we’ll focus mainly on the latter. You can think of this process as if you were herding your electronic sheep from various digital fields into the cozy pen of Salesforce.

Salesforce data migration allows an organization to move disparate data into a central, reliable source, improving decision-making and operational efficiency. Here’s how it benefits the corporate structure:

• Data Unification: By combining data from varied sources, data migration ensures that every piece of customer information is accessible in one place, providing a comprehensive view that enhances customer relationship management.
• Data Quality: The migration process acts as a refinement step, filtering out redundant and erroneous data, thus enhancing the quality of the information businesses rely on.
• Performance Enhancement: Updated and migrated data leverages the latest advancements in Salesforce, including enhanced features and robust security, to improve overall system performance.
• Process Optimization: Aligning data with current organizational requirements streamlines workflows and processes, making them more efficient and effective in meeting business objectives.
• Cost Efficiency: It eliminates unnecessary data storage and management costs by removing duplicate and outdated information, leading to a more streamlined and cost-effective data management approach.

Do you want to move your data to Salesforce without hassle? First, you must know your options and potential pitfalls, so let’s begin!

Delving into data migration in Salesforce, one encounters several pain points and challenges:

• Complex APIs: Learning and utilizing Salesforce’s intricate APIs can be daunting for even seasoned developers.
• Data Integrity: Ensuring data quality, security, and governance demands stringent checks and measures.
• Resource Intensiveness: Data migration often consumes considerable time and resources, affecting overall productivity.

The data migration process in Salesforce typically involves the same steps:

1. Deciding whether you need to import or export data.
2. Choosing the data sources and destinations.
3. Preparing your data for migration.
4. Using the right tools to map and import data.
5. Validating post-migration data to ensure accuracy.

Migration is a one-time or periodic movement of data into Salesforce, while integration involves continuous data synchronization between Salesforce and other systems.

Integration allows for more dynamic data flows and can be batched, real-time, or event-driven, tailored to specific business needs:

• Batch: This method involves transferring large volumes of data at scheduled intervals, such as daily or weekly. Batch integration is suitable for scenarios where data consistency is not critical, and latency is acceptable.
• Real-time: This method involves transferring data as soon as it is created or updated, such as when a user submits a form or updates a record. Real-time integration is suitable for scenarios where data consistency is essential and latency is not acceptable.
• Event-driven: This method involves transferring data based on specific events or triggers, such as when a record meets specific criteria or an external system sends a notification. Event-driven integration is suitable for scenarios where data needs to be synchronized across multiple systems in response to business events.

Both real-time and event-driven integrations can be used for migration purposes. You can use these when you want to migrate without downtime and avoiding having a cutoff date that everyone is dreading.

For example, let’s say you wanted to get data from an old Microsoft Dynamics on-premises installation to a new online Salesforce org. You could establish an integration between both, which would allow you to:

• Immediately have the data you need in Salesforce
• Keep getting the necessary data into Salesforce
• Have users using Salesforce and Dynamics as needed, for example, to allow for training in the Salesforce platform

This integration can be kept for as long as you need it, and it allows for very smooth migrations, a strong stress-level reduction, and brilliant user adoption rates, as users can take in the new system at their own pace.

• The journey is laden with potential pitfalls. Data quality, security breaches, and governance non-compliance are significant risks:

  • Data quality
  • The pitfall: Data quality is the degree to which data is accurate, complete, consistent, and relevant for the intended purpose. Poor data quality can result in errors, inefficiencies, and poor decision-making. Data quality issues include data duplication, corruption, inconsistency, incompleteness, and lack of relevance. To ensure data quality, you must carefully plan, validate, cleanse, and transform data before, during, and after migration.
  • Avoiding it: Testing and validation are critical. Before the migration, testing ensures the accuracy and completeness of the data, as well as the reliability of the migration scripts or tools to be used. Validation after migration, on the other hand, is crucial to confirm that the data has been accurately transferred and is functioning as expected within Salesforce. This post-migration step is essential to verify that all records are intact, relationships are preserved, and data works harmoniously with Salesforce’s features and third-party applications.
  • Security breaches
  • The pitfall: One of the primary concerns during the data migration process is the risk of unauthorized access to data, which can jeopardize the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of the data. This risk may arise if migration tools or connections to Salesforce are not sufficiently secured, resulting in possible data interception or leakage.
  • Avoiding it: Encrypting all data transmissions and implementing strict controls and monitoring for access to the migration tools and the Salesforce environment is imperative. Another significant risk is the unintentional exposure of sensitive data due to mishandling or configuration errors. Understanding Salesforce’s security model is vital, including organization-wide defaults, role hierarchies, sharing rules, and field-level security.
  • Governance non-compliance
  • The pitfall: Failing to comply with the rules, regulations, and standards governing data use and management can lead to legal, financial, and reputational risks, such as fines, penalties, lawsuits, and loss of trust.
  • Avoiding it: Make sure the data migration is aligned with the data governance framework in terms of data policies, data roles, data processes, and data security.

Using an integration platform like Connect Bridge makes a world of difference in getting the data migration ready to run and also in what happens after that initial run.

Connect Bridge redefines the migration process to Salesforce by ingeniously allowing you to interact with Salesforce via SQL statements rather than Salesforce API calls. This approach elegantly sidesteps the complexities of direct API interactions. It ensures compatibility with Salesforce’s evolving architecture (and API), which means it significantly reduces the maintenance efforts typically associated with API management.

Key features of Connect Bridge include:

• Less Learning: Connect Bridge is designed to effectively eliminate the steep learning curve often associated with mastering Salesforce’s API. This user-friendly aspect democratizes the migration process, allowing users with varying levels of technical expertise to confidently manage their data migration tasks.
• Forward Compatibility: A standout feature of Connect Bridge is its forward compatibility, a commitment guaranteed by Connecting Software. This ensures that as Salesforce evolves, Connect Bridge adapts, providing a future-proof solution for data migration. This aspect is particularly important in the rapidly changing tech landscape, offering users peace of mind that their migration tool remains relevant and effective.

Data Loader is a simple client application specifically designed for the bulk import and export of data in Salesforce. A crucial aspect of Data Loader is its reliance on comma-separated values (CSV) files. For importing data, Data Loader needs the data to be in a CSV file. Conversely, when it comes to exporting data, Data Loader generates CSV files.

When compared with Salesforce’s own Data Loader, Connect Bridge shines in its advanced capabilities and flexibility. While Data Loader serves as a functional tool for data import and export, Connect Bridge can handle complex migration tasks end-to-end.

For example, with Connect Bridge, you can connect an on-premises system to your online Salesforce and import data directly, as presented on the Database Salesforce Sync page.

In this article, we’ve walked you through the key parts of moving data into Salesforce. Getting Salesforce data migration right is crucial because that is how your company can bring all its data together, making your work processes smoother and saving you money. We talked about the challenges you might face, like dealing with poor data quality, making sure your data is safe and correct, and how much time and effort it can take.

We also explained how moving data to Salesforce is different from keeping it updated regularly with other systems and showed you different ways to do this depending on what your business needs.

One of the main things we covered is two possible tools you can use: Salesforce Data Loader and Connect Bridge. Connect Bridge lets you use simple SQL commands instead of directly dealing with the more complicated Salesforce API. This means less work for you and ensures that your migration or integration using Connect Bridge will still work as Salesforce (inevitably) changes.

If you’re thinking about moving your data to Salesforce and want it to be straightforward, Connect Bridge is a good choice. To learn more about how it can help you, reach out to me using the Connect Bridge contact form. It’s time to make your data move successful and stress-free!

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