Chaos Testing: Ensuring a Resilient Salesforce Org and Better Risk Management

The digital business space isn’t perfect. Digital threats are real and we all have seen the biggest of companies falling prey to digital disruptions. Be it system outage, cyberattacks, malware, etc, the losses are tremendous including financial and reputation loss.

In this blog post, we will talk about how organizations can maintain their Salesforce Org’s resiliency for better risk management. Salesforce, being the backbone of the entire customer relationship and business processes, is subject to multiple risks with Personally Identifiable Information(PII) leakage like software failure, cyberattacks, etc.

Thus, risk management has become more relevant today. It is a proactive exercise as risks may or may not occur. But if they do, you’ll be glad you are prepared to tackle them effectively.

Risk Management and Chaos Testing

System failures are inevitable. It is better to focus on the meantime to recovery (MTTR) rather than the mean time to failure (MTTF). So, why not deliberately introduce an error or failure to ensure your Salesforce instance and all its elements and processes can deal with it? This is what chaos testing is all about and its importance is increasing parallelly with the digital threats that your Salesforce instance is exposed to.

If you are concerned about risk management against digital threats, chaos testing would lead you the right way. No matter how well-configured your Salesforce Org is, once it is running on multiple machines and reaches multiple users, complexity errors are going to happen.

Now, purposely crashing your Salesforce Org may seem counterintuitive to you, but here are the reasons why you should do so:

• Dealing with Contingencies

Contingencies like system failure, outage, etc, may occur unexpectedly within your Salesforce Org but, in this case, the date and time of the failure are known beforehand. However, the specific failure should not be known. Since the date and time would be predetermined, the personnel will be ready to immediately jump in and fix the problems when they occur.

• Overall Monitoring

The data within your Salesforce instance is always subject to change due to many internal and external factors. Under chaos testing, the extensive focus would be put on monitoring the system data before, during, and after the failure. This would not only help with recovery from the failure itself but also provide data for subsequent analysis and improvement of the workflows within Salesforce.

• Better Understanding of the Salesforce Instance

Many changes occur at the backend of your Salesforce instance and new updates or configurations are bound to happen as well. Chaos testing is needed to understand how exactly your system governs all your business processes. It also highlights new insights about the new elements present in your instance after the system has been recovered or brought back online and the subsequent analysis has taken place.

• Aware and Informed Personnel

The biggest concern is that of increasing the awareness of everyone in the organization on the need to focus on resilience. And, there’s nothing better than slight errors, here and there, with your Salesforce instance to get folks to pay attention.

Benefits of Chaos Testing
Now that you know the rising need and importance of chaos testing, you must also know the benefits that it would provide you with:

1. It enables businesses to quickly identify hidden defects, vulnerabilities, and other issues within their Salesforce instance, which may never have presented themselves during the traditional testing processes. If the critical errors lying around aren’t dealt with on time, they may prove fatal in the long run.

2. Chaos testing in combination with a DevOps set-up is the ultimate way of developing and delivering a highly fault-tolerant and resilient Salesforce instance as continuous monitoring and feedback loop is established, which provides the scope for continuous improvement.

3. Through the intentional introduction of software failures, the chaos testing method measures your instance’s ability to tackle the glitches and evaluate their impact on its availability and durability, thus, minimizing the time taken to recover from a failure.

Conclusion
While the threats to your Salesforce instance cannot completely be avoided, chaos testing equips and prepares you to deal with them. It improves your MTTR, organizational confidence in the Salesforce resilience, and will also keep you out of tomorrow’s headlines.

Need help with keeping your Salesforce Org bug-free and resilient all the time? Talk to us!