Author: David Derrier - Head of Operations at Nexell.

A bit of context

The cloud is everywhere in our daily lives. However, when we’re talking about data residency, the notion of “everywhere” is very subtle. As the global CRM leader trusted by 150,000 organizations worldwide, Salesforce has invested time, money, and effort into building, maintaining, and securing its data centers throughout the world. In Europe, for instance, Salesforce has 3 internally-managed data centers, in London, Paris, and Frankfurt, where customer data is stored and protected in line with top-level security standards. Over the years, several industries - like financial services and healthcare - have been more complex to onboard than others, due to strict regulations surrounding data privacy/storage/protection.

Welcome to a new era…

Salesforce and Amazon have worked together in the past years to find the right solution and increase the pressure on certain markets where competitors already offer local data residency. Switzerland - among other countries - is no exception. In 2021, Salesforce announced that Hyperforce would allow customers to host their data locally.
Trust is Salesforce’s number one value and it is key for them to reassure customers in highly-regulated industries. Swiss healthcare organizations must store medical data within the country, with no exceptions, to align with federal law. Also, Swiss financial institutions must store and process personal data in a very specific way to comply with FINMA regulations. Government-subsidized organizations must keep sensitive data locally to meet the requirements of their funding entities like cantons or cities. These are among the concrete use cases that Hyperforce aims to address.

Being a new infrastructure architecture, Hyperforce unifies the foundations of the various clouds and allows Salesforce to scale rapidly and securely via public cloud partners. Doesn’t this seem like a revolution in the CRM world? At Nexell, which has been active in the CRM world for 20 years, we have been waiting for that for a long time.

How does it work?

At the time of subscription, any new customer can choose - for free - the server location, but what about existing customers? Let’s look at a concrete example:
You have been using Salesforce for years, with storage in Frankfurt and Paris. Now you’d like to store your data locally in Switzerland. What can Salesforce do for you? You can request a switch and Salesforce will proceed for free. Yes, you read that right; you will incur no extra cost. In case you have already deeply configured or customized your Salesforce org and want to migrate to another location, no panic! Your features and data will not be impacted, and the switch will be transparent for you and for your users.

Common questions from our prospects and customers

When will Hyperforce be available in Switzerland?

We expect Hyperforce to be available in Switzerland in 2022/2023. Exact dates are to be confirmed.

Does Hyperforce support all products?

Hyperforce will support primarily the following products: Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Experience Cloud, Chatter, Lightning Platform, Tableau CRM, Manufacturing Cloud, Consumer Goods Cloud, CDP. Associated branded packages (e.g., CPQ, Financial Services Cloud, Net Zero Cloud, Field Service, etc.). Consequently, not all products will be migrated to Hyperforce in this first phase. For instance, Marketing Cloud and Pardot are not currently in the scope.

Will I be able to integrate Salesforce the same way as I did before?

Integrations will function as in any other Salesforce instance and data can be transferred out of the country through standard interfaces.

Will it be available to Salesforce.org/P10 customers?

Yes. Trial orgs will also be available.

How long will the transition take?

During the time of migration, the Salesforce org will be in read-only mode. The duration of the planned service downtime is expected to be around 3 hours.

Will Hyperforce make the configuration/customization phase more complex and less flexible?

No, this will be fully transparent.

Will Salesforce be more expensive overall?

For the time being, this innovation is not expected to impact license costs (#safeharbor)

Now, what’s next?

Do you need help migrating your current Salesforce org to Hyperforce?
Are you in healthcare or financial services and do you want to discuss specific use cases surrounding data privacy and residency to ensure that Salesforce is the right solution?
Do you want to understand the impact of Salesforce on your Salesforce project?

Reach out to Nexell; contact us here.