Cut Costs, Not Corners: How Salesforce Archiving Can Slash Your Storage Spend

Salesforce is a powerhouse customer relationship management (CRM) platform, helping organizations manage customer data, relationships, and sales pipelines at scale. From account managers and support teams to marketing leaders and operations specialists, Salesforce users across functions are empowered to intelligently and effectively manage customers in all stages of their journey. 

However, as business grows, so does the amount of Salesforce data you create and store — especially as AI solutions become more integrated into daily workflows. This can cause organizations of all shapes and sizes to unknowingly overspend on storage, bog down their CRM performance, and risk compliance issues, all because they’re holding onto data they no longer need. Without automated, scalable Salesforce data management in place, this may seem like a losing battle. 

Why Salesforce Storage Costs Are Rising

Any Salesforce administrator will tell you that managing data and file storage can be a full-time job. And with global data growing at an average rate of 24% per year, it’s easy to hit those thresholds fast.  

Consider this: every customer support case, every marketing email, and every new lead or opportunity increases your organization’s data footprint. Multiply that across hundreds or thousands of users, throw in a few conferences, event follow-ups, and AI-driven automations, and these data modifications can add up fast. The result? You hit your storage limits faster than you can say Agentforce!  

However, there’s more to excess Salesforce storage than just increasing your costs: 

• Performance degradation: More data and more records in your Salesforce environment can have a direct impact on your CRM performance. Workflows, Salesforce object query language (SOQL) queries, even backup jobs can all see slower runtimes with more records to search through.
• AI accuracy concerns: With legacy data floating around your Salesforce environment, Einstein and Agentforce can easily learn from and provide responses based on outdated data.
• Compliance risks: More data, whether that’s in Salesforce or SharePoint or Google Workspace, almost always equates to more risk. Without automated processes to responsibly remove data, the risk of data leaks and regulatory non-compliance quickly escalates. 

The Smarter Approach: Salesforce Archiving

Salesforce Archiving is a smarter way to manage your CRM data footprint without the need to sacrifice accessibility or compliance. Rather than just going and bulk deleting records until you're under your storage limit, AvePoint’s solution can help automate the removal of your data while maintaining access to the archived records.  

AvePoint’s new Salesforce Archiving solution automates this process so you can: 

• Identify and remove redundant or obsolete records automatically. Archive policies can be created and saved to run as you see fit – manually or on a schedule – to ensure that legacy data doesn’t pile up in your environments.  
• Set granular policies. Configure your records to be archived based on specific, field-level filters — or create your own custom SOQL queries. With the ability to set specific retention policies (up to unlimited retention), you can ensure compliance with all applicable standards.
• Retain access to archived data. Whether it’s for future reference, auditing, or even restoring records, this access ensures that just because something has been removed from your Salesforce environment, it doesn’t mean it’s gone forever.
• Manage everything in one platform. Combine Salesforce archiving with backup, sandbox seeding or data export capabilities — all from a single pane of glass. 

Why This Matters for Your Salesforce Data Management Strategy

If your Salesforce storage is growing faster than you can manage it, taking a proactive approach is key. With Salesforce Archiving, you can: 

• Reduce salesforce storage costs without losing critical historical data.
• Improve CRM performance by keeping active storage lean.
• Mitigate compliance risks with retention controls and defensible deletion policies.
• Boost AI accuracy by ensuring only relevant, up-to-date data is in your production environment. 

Start with a Self-Assessment

Before deciding on a Salesforce archiving strategy, it helps to understand your current data landscape and challenges. Start by asking yourself:  

• How much data are we storing in Salesforce?  
• Is all of that data actively being used, or can we offload any of it?  
• Have we seen recent performance decreases in Salesforce, especially as a result of data overages?  
• Do we need to remove any CRM data for compliance, be it internal or external standards?  
• Are we making use of Salesforce’s new AI features, and are we concerned about the accuracy of those responses?  

If you answered “yes” to any of the above, it’s time to explore Salesforce Archiving as part of your data management strategy. Request a demo today and see how you can reduce storage costs, lower risk, and keep your CRM running at peak performance.