Ownbackup, SaaS backups and sandbox tests

Founded in 2012 in Tel Aviv and now also based in London and Fort Lee in New Jersey, the company Ownbackup specializes in backing up SaaS applications with a particular focus on solutions from Sage, Salesforce, Service Now , Slack, Veeva and nCino, but still not Microsoft. We met this publisher, a Spinning competitor, during a Zoom meeting organized for European journalists as part of a special Israel virtual IT Press Tour. OwnBackup offers a range of services in the field of archives, including file comparison, recovery, management, sandboxing (see below), replication and compliance. Its Data Backup Suite allows administrators to schedule automatic daily backups of custom objects, standard objects, and attachments, and to restore backed-up data, metadata, and relationships on command.

Originally, Ownbackup intended to address the shortcomings of SaaS platforms, which do not always include backup and restore services that many businesses need, for example to protect themselves from user errors. In addition to the usual backup and restore options, Ownbackup displays a vision broader of what backup really means and offers data comparison and restore tools to provide more granular control in a larger backup and restore space. Most of Ownbackup’s backup processes integrate with external systems through its API. To this end, backup files can be exported automatically to a variety of databases, and data from Salesforce can be exposed to on-premises applications and analysis tools. Users receive alerts based on triggers, workflows, and validation rules when data is changed or restored, and they can receive backup status alerts via email.

A tool tailored for Salesforce

For Salesforce, the publisher also highlights Salesforce AppExchange, a sandbox seeding solution. In practice, this means that Ownbackup’s backup technology can be used to create a fully populated sandbox for development and testing. With Ownbackup’s Sandbox Seeding, development teams can populate a Salesforce sandbox with an anonymized dataset through in-app object filters, while preserving relationships between data objects. This means development teams can more easily ensure that code and workflows are tested on relevant, well-sized datasets with just a few clicks. While it seems like a relatively straightforward task, creating sandboxes where developers can create and test new offerings actually comes with an operational burden. By taking its existing backup and recovery tools and reassigning them to a different use case (albeit with essentially the same technical steps), Ownbackup manages to both expand its total market while leveraging existing tools.

Finally, it should be noted that to participate in the international effort against the coronavirus pandemic, Ownbackup is launching free services for the backup and recovery of patient health data. The publisher employs nearly 200 people around the world.