Perhaps the biggest concern when embarking on an org merge due to M&A is the fear of losing some critical bit of data from the old org. And it’s not without reason—22 percent of company folders are open to everyone, which means there is a high risk of data insecurity for most enterprises. The volatility of such data security problems only increases when you are in the middle of an active org migration project as part of M&A integration. That’s why making a plan for old org data preservation is crucial to long-term business integrity (and the IT team’s chances of a good night’s sleep). 

We wanted to review some data preservation best practices for organizations that have recently completed or will soon finalize M&A agreements. Because once the deal is signed, it’s not long before the integration planning meetings demand a game plan that safeguards both old and new business entities. Let’s discuss the merits of old org backup archives, traceable migrations, and data cleansing activities. 

Backup archives

This may sound obvious, but considering the estimated 60 percent of incomplete business backups out there, it needs repeating: backups are all-important to data maintenance even when not going through an org merge, and they serve as a critical fallback when you are preparing to enact data migration. You may have internal company or external regulations requiring you to hold on to data for a period of time depending on the nature of your business, so this is another consideration for ensuring you can still get at that data after a merge.

Before you migrate data, metadata, and attachments during the org merge, consider a data protection solution with unlimited storage. That way, no matter what happens during the merge process and beyond, you’ll have a snapshot of the old schema and data archived in your backups. Keeping backup archives of the acquired org will help minimize your risk of leaving out necessary data in the future, even after they are sunsetted in Salesforce.

Make the migration easily traceable 

In addition to your data backup archives, preparing to move from one org to another with clearly documented flows is another way you can preserve the effectiveness of your old org’s data. This is also known as…

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