Is Your Salesforce Org Overflowing with Data? You Need an ‘’Attic’’ Strategy

Key Takeaways

• Maximize performance by separating active data from inactive records.
• Reduce primary data volume to accelerate workflows and lower costs.
• Keep historical data compliant and secure within the trusted Salesforce core platform.

Do you have that one closet or drawer in your home where everything gets shoved? You know the one‌. Where daily essentials are crammed next to things you haven’t touched in years.

With spring around the corner, you’re likely thinking about that dreadful closet in your own home. It’s time to spring clean and declutter. Maybe you want to pack up your winter gear for next year, but you wouldn’t store your sleds, shovels, and boots in your front hallway for the next 11 months, would you? If you did, it would be impossible to quickly leave with the things you actually need.

Your data works the same way. Right now, many Salesforce orgs are being treated like one giant, overflowing hallway closet. When your only storage is one big unorganized space, your org understandably slows down and you spend more time sifting through “clutter” than following up with leads.

The solution isn’t just to buy more space. It’s to organize that space effectively. To build a high-performance org, you need two distinct spaces for your data: a “closet” and an “attic”.

Step 1: Organize your “closet” (Active storage)

Think of your “closet” as the home for your active, high-velocity data. If you’re in Healthcare and Life Sciences (HLS) for example, this would include your active patient charts, pending insurance claims, and live clinical trial data.

As your business expands from a small startup to a rapidly growing enterprise your “closet” needs to grow along with you. Growth brings high-volume transactional data, more users, and a heavier reliance on real-time reports.

Benefits of active storage:

• Speed: Keeps your daily operations fast and editable.
• Accessibility: Admins get immediate access to the records they need for daily care and reporting.
• Real-time insights: Powers the live dashboards that drive your business decisions.

Step 2: Build your “attic” (Archive)

So, what happens to the data you don’t need every day, but aren’t ready to just throw it away? You can’t toss a legacy patient record or a completed study if you’re legally required to keep it for regulatory compliance.

This is where an “attic” becomes critical to your data management strategy. By using Salesforce Archive, you relocate that inactive, historical data into a secure, compliant space that stays out of your “way.”

Benefits of archiving data:

1. Boost performance: By offloading historical records to a secure secondary location, you ensure only active data is stored in production. As as result, your org runs faster, reports pull in seconds, and records are easier to find.
2. Improve compliance: Organizations without proper archiving face non-compliance costs 2.65x higher than those with a strategy in place. With Archive, you define archiving policies that automatically archive data and files based on rules you set to comply with relevant internal policies and government regulations. 
3. Reduce risk: Better data retention practices can reduce the average cost of a data breach by $1.22M by ensuring sensitive, inactive data isn’t sitting in production. 

More recently, archiving your data has another benefit: optimizing AI. To ensure AI agents make the best decisions, they need to be trained on the most relevant, high-quality datasets. By archiving the “noise” of obsolete data, you ensure your AI models are focused on the “signal” of your current business activity.

NEW: Introducing Archive on Core

Thanks to the launch of Archive 2.0, your data attic just got a major renovation. Now, we’ve improved the experience for admins and security teams, including:

• Within the Trust boundary: Your archived data stays entirely within the Salesforce infrastructure. It benefits from the same security and compliance standards as your live data.
• Easier implementation: No more managing or updating separate packages. It’s built-in, meaning faster deployment and zero maintenance overhead.
• Better scalability: Built on a robust architecture designed for enterprise-level data volumes.
• Greater visibility: A redesigned UI with precise error messaging, making it easier than ever to configure your “attic” and troubleshoot on the fly.

The complete strategy: Storage + Archive

A complete data management strategy isn’t an “either/or” choice. The most efficient agentic enterprises have a complete data organization strategy meant to scale without the lag, using both active and cold storage.

Don’t let your data growth become a bottleneck. By separating your everyday data from the records you don’t access regularly, you ensure your team has the room they need to innovate, stay compliant, and move fast. Ready to clean out your data closet? Learn more about Salesforce Archive.