Salesforce Customers Could Have Had A Better Week If They Had Picked A Private Cloud Solution

There isn't a whole lot of information on what exactly went wrong, but we do know that Salesforce users saw an outage that lasted for 15 hours .

We saw the complaints online, read the messages on Twitter, checked out memes that circulated all weekend, and thought long and hard about the massive outage that affected a whole lot of Salesforce users. There were conflicting reports at first but, apparently, the deployment of a database script inadvertently gave users broader access than intended. This is a polite way of saying there were serious issues related to security that affected a lot of paying customers.

What went wrong with Salesforce?

There isn’t a whole lot of information on what exactly went wrong, but we do know that Salesforce users saw an outage that lasted for 15 hours before administrators at customers’ firms were given access and then needed to manually restore their users’ permissions. What happened in that duration, according to a number of media reports, is that access to all current and former clients of the company’s Pardot B2B marketing automation system was blocked after the deployment of a database script gave users broader data access.

The scripting error reportedly only affected the Pardot service but, according to an article on the company’s website, it initially blocked access to all instances of its software for affected organizations until it could isolate the affected ones. Given that Pardot is marketed as a solution that helps create more leads, generate more pipeline, and empower sales to close more deals, it’s safe to say that this was an outage that affected the CRM solution as a whole.

The company accidentally gave all users, among current and former customers, sysadmin-level access to all data, including permission to read, edit and delete, before pulling offline all instances running Pardot to prevent any information theft or tampering. As a result, any customers sharing a Pardot-hosting instance lost access. In other words, all customers had to pay the price for what affected a smaller number of them. For any serious CRM provider, this would be considered a failure on all fronts.

Is the Public Cloud a problem?

Salesforce users have long been aware of the common problems associated with public cloud deployment. The repercussions of an outage like the one that occurred can be massive. According to Gartner, the average cost of an IT outage is $5,600 per minute, which can go up to as much as $140,000 per hour, and as much as $540,000 per hour at the higher end.

One of the biggest problems with public cloud is that its servers are multi-tenant environments, which means other companies’ data may be stored on the same server as one company’s data. Processing power is also shared, which is exactly why all customers had to suffer for what ought to have impacted only a few of them.

The advantages of NexJ Private Cloud

Private clouds are single tenant solutions. They are resources used exclusively by a single organization. This cloud can be physically located on a company’s on-site datacenter or hosted by a third-party service provider, but its services and infrastructure are maintained on a private network.

What NexJ Systems offers are flexible cloud-based deployment options that can be tailored to meet any needs. NexJ’s secure private cloud option delivers custom deployment and integration, even with disparate data sources. This means data can be kept at source, while leveraging the advantages of a cloud environment.

Earlier this year, NexJ chose IBM Cloud Private to host its customer relationship management (CRM) platform for small and medium enterprise (SME) wealth managers. With IBM Cloud Private, NexJ leverages a suite of services like IBM Cloud Log Analysis with Kibana, IBM Cloud Databases for Elasticsearch, and IBM Cloud Object Storage for mass data storage, all orchestrated through IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service and Istio. This allows NexJ’s wealth management customers to securely streamline how they move and manage customer data across environments, freeing them up to spend more time focusing on driving new revenue streams and providing better experiences for customers.

To find out more why private cloud for CRM is a more secure option, contact us today. You can take advantage of our exclusive Early Access Offer, or do nothing and wait for the next outage that’s probably just around the corner.

Author: Adam Edmonds

Vice President, Products

With almost 2 decades of experience developing customer management solutions in financial services and insurance, Adam Edmonds is responsible for establishing overall product vision and designing easy to use solutions that solve real market problems.

Adam is excited to share the lessons he has learned and his insights on where the industry is heading with readers of his blog. He encourages readers to join the discussion or reach out to him with their own insights, best practices, and solutions to industry challenges.