Salesforce Adds Data Resilience Capabilities After Own Co. Acquisition

‘It’s a very low-risk way to try to get your data as clean as you possibly can get it, which is also better for your business,’ says Salesforce executive Marla Hay.

Salesforce has made products under recently acquired Own Co. part of its Salesforce platform, bringing solution providers new tools for data resilience, compliance and security as customers explore the vendor’s artificial intelligence products.

Marla Hay, vice president of product management for security, privacy and data management for the San Francisco-based AI, cloud and enterprise application vendor, told CRN in an interview that the new platform capabilities are especially important as solution providers talk to Salesforce customers about AI.

“Before you start any major initiative, make sure that you have a backup in place,” Hay said. “That’s especially more important when you’re looking at something like AI and agents, where your experience is only going to be as good as the information that you’re able to get.”

Salesforce Adds Own Capabilities

The new capabilities should help solution providers with figuring out the riskiness of data for customers using autonomous AI software called agents and better enable agents for performing security tasks, she said.

The capabilities should also help with customer data hygiene and making sure data can be reverted to a previous state if it becomes corrupted or lost, she said.

“It’s a very low-risk way to try to get your data as clean as you possibly can get it, which is also better for your business anyway,” she said. “It makes your operations run faster. It makes your customer experiences better. It makes the data more accurate.”

Salesforce revealed its intention to buy Own in September. Own had more than 7,000 customers at the time.

Among the changes are Salesforce expanding its data mask ability with Own Accelerate seeding, allowing for secure, representative test data in sandbox environments. This summer, Salesforce will allow users to set dynamic data masking policies in its Data Cloud offer, according to the vendor.

Own Secure has been integrated into Salesforce Shield and Security Center for better monitoring, detection and protection. Users have a centralized view of field history tracking and the ability to see which fields are ready for encryption, according to the vendor.

The new Security Center adds better risk identification and remediation and the ability to automatically identify high-risk users for fast compliance.

Own Recover has become Salesforce Backup & Recover, bringing continuous data protection for Salesforce users. Backup & Recover can capture and visualize data and metadata changes in real time and send alerts for anomalies and accidental deletions.

Data is recoverable at the minute and field level and Backup & Recover works with ServiceNow and Microsoft Dynamics 365 data, according to Salesforce.

The new Salesforce Discover gives developers and administrators insight into historical data in a secure time-series format. Discover integrates with Salesforce subsidiary Tableau, Salesforce Data Cloud and the vendor’s Agentforce artificial intelligence agent platform.

Discover automatically tracks data in backups and can feed predictive models such as propensity to buy, according to Salesforce.

The Archive tool promises to optimize data storage spend by archiving inactive records and allowing automated archival policies and custom retention periods to fit regulations. Users can make archived data visible to users in production but inaccessible to Agentforce if they want, with an easy unarchiving capability.