Published on: 17 May 2021
Last Updated on: 02 January 2025
Online backup services are helping many businesses in storing their files on the web. It is better than using hard drives and other external storage for some reasons, especially for security purposes.
IT nerds in California are so amazed at Backblaze because of how it keeps more data safely. It is named the best cloud storage service with its personal and business backup function.
Cloud storage works to protect old and new files better than Dropbox and other online storage mediums. Its security level is also higher than expected with the help of experts behind it.
Well, before securing your files & data on Cloud storage, you must always think about IT equipment disposal and server recycling. This is to get rid of all the unwanted hardware in the server room, thus creating new space. A data center decommissioning specialist like “Dataknox” can help in such complex ITAD solutions in Newark CA, in a professional way.
If you are in doubt whether Backblaze is good for your business, below is a rundown of benefits you can consider in making decisions.
Four Benefits of Backblaze’s Cloud Storage
1. Easy to Manage:
Backblaze is easy to use and ideal for a wide range of users. Once the backup plan is set, the cloud server will be fully responsible for keeping your files secure.
However, Backblaze is unlike other backup storage that allows user intervention over the files at any time. The software itself will do the tasks for you. This function may not be good for some users but benefits others.
2. Backups File Automatically:
As said earlier, user intervention is limited with Backblaze’s backup storage. The good news is that it keeps files automatically for unlimited storage at a reasonable cost.
This main feature of cloud storage makes the backup process run continuously. It assures keeping files safely at the right places with the help of data centers. Backblaze guarantees to manage your data with less hassle on your behalf.
3. Full Protection Against Data Loss:
The disadvantage of other backup services is providing easy access to files through multiple devices. This may cause data loss if not manage very well. With Backblaze, it promotes data protection that helps to recover files easily when lost or stolen.
It also boasts double-layer security by encrypting all of your files on drives to improve privacy. It helps to prevent hackers to steal your data whenever they wanted.
4. Unlimited Storage:
Lastly, Backblaze can offer businesses extra storage up to quintillion bytes to hold their data. It is huge enough to keep even the files of larger enterprises. That is why this online backup service can be suitable for a wide range of usage.
Moreover, it is very affordable with all the other features it has to offer. Its unlimited online backup is a plus that requires additional cost.
Final Thoughts:
Wrapping it all up, entrusting your business files with Backblaze is the right decision. It protects your data from possible security leaks, unlike other backup storage options. Backblaze is also affordable and yet provides the best storage features for your specific needs. The staff behind will be fully responsible for keeping your files secured and easy to access.
For your data backup needs, contact Backblaze for more details.
Content Rally wrapped around an online publication where you can publish your own intellectuals. It is a publishing platform designed to make great stories by content creators. This is your era, your place to be online. So come forward share your views, thoughts and ideas via Content Rally.
The right environment is essential for the growth of a business and for the employees to be result-driven. A healthy environment can either boost your productivity or hamper it. While deciding on office space, I am sure you would be going through different factors in mind. Here I am discussing one of the most important factors which are usually ignored by the people. While trying to decide between an open office space and cubicle office space, wither people will choose the one which is cheaper or they will opt for a cubicle just because they are more habitual to it.
The importance of office layout depends on the type of work a person has to do. If somebody is into developing and he or she does a lot of coding, then a cubicle would be more suitable for them as they would be able to concentrate more in a cubicle than an open working space. And if a person writes blogs or does creative writing, then they would not mind an open environment. And they can even draw inspiration from their surroundings. While both the options are not bad if you’re co-working space is good, but both of them have some pros and cons. Let’s discuss some points here.
Choosing Open Office Space vs Cubicle Office Space:
Open Office Plan:
Open office plan also called a modern layout, which is most commonly seen in a Google office, is an office layout where you do not have any kind of cubicles and environment is open and casual. These days more and more people are considering these types of offices because it makes their company look cool and employees also consider it these days more than a corporate environment. But you have to understand not all types of employees like this type of environment, so it is very important for you to analyze your team first and then decide.
Cubicle office plan:
Cubicle office space is often seen at corporate offices and banks. The cubicle option in a co-working facility is often an expensive option, so you need to consider what do you need a cubicle or not.
Type of people:
Suppose if you have introverts in your team, then they wouldn’t really be comfortable with working in an open environment, as they enjoy being in themselves and more people's presence can make them uncomfortable, but if the majority of people are extrovert than the case would be vice versa.
Idea generation:
An open office plan encourages communication which is great for idea generation and brainstorming. So it is great for idea generation as people can bounce off their ideas off of each other and can come up with great concepts and collaboration ideas.
Lack of Privacy:
An open office plan can severely affect a person’s privacy which can interfere with the employee's mind and they cannot express openly, as they fear that other people might be judging them. It also not great for someone who has to do a lot of client interaction and through calls and Skype, it would disturb other people also and the person who is on the call also.
A Common Solution:
This would be the best option for any kind of business, as a person who loves to work in a cubicle can work there and if a person wants to work in an open space, they can do that. Employees can even switch places so that they can get a break from spending their whole day at the same place. The open office space can also be used the time to time as an accelerator for idea generation.
If you are a new business owner:
If it's your first time managing a business and trying to expand it most efficiently, you may find that there are many tips and tricks that you can keep in mind while you are growing. With office rental options in Miami, you can ensure that you can find a working space where you can constantly find new clients, allowing you to help your business develop. It's not easy to have all of the answers at the beginning, but having an office where you can quietly get down to work with your employees is one of the most important factors to a successful business.
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From the gig economy to people looking to work full time for themselves, growing numbers of workers are setting up at home or planning their next move away from the traditional office.
Whether the choice to work from home is to build a second career or to provide some insurance if their main career doesn’t pan out, home working is a booming market. These are some of the most lucrative opportunities when it comes to creating a successful self-made career.
1. Consulting From Home
Using your current industry knowledge and applying it for the benefit of others is the leading way for people to head out on their own.
Creating a consultancy requires years of a particular skill, a wide range of contacts and perhaps a strong reputation in your field. But, with those to hand, people in PR, marketing, legal, architecture, design, advisory work, and many other areas, have struck out successfully to capture clients from their old business or build new customer bases.
Consultants can charge premium rates for their skills, knowledge and advice and consultancy work often comes with a side order of business lunches, premium networking opportunities, and other events to help make an even stronger business.
2. Writing for a Living
Many writers often have side gigs, be it website, magazine or newspaper reviews, industry articles, or writing a novel or script. Anyone with the ability to write can find endless use for that skill.
Much freelance writing work starts out as low-pay but is still better for students or those starting work than other options. And as your portfolio and contacts grow, writers often find better work, while professional writers can build who primary or secondary careers out of well-paid gigs, including travel writing with lots of perks, or business/political writing with great rates and access to power.
And, if you can write fluently in a popular foreign language, you are able to work across borders for highly-skilled translation work.
3. Virtual Assistants Are In Demand
While a consultant uses their business knowledge to provide a career, virtual assistants use their practical business acumen and skills to provide key office/secretarial/admin skills to people who run their own small companies but lack the time or resources to handle them. A good VA can be just as smart as the CEO, just as useful as an office manager, and can work for several businesses at once time-sharing as needed, either permanently or until they find one company they really like working with and feel of great value to.
4. Creative Skills Can Make You Stand Out
For people not used to the office environment, using your creative skills is a great way to build a home business opportunity and can be ideal for building a personal brand or bespoke product line that no one else offers.
From baking cakes to making crafts (using driftwood, sea glass, scrap metal, and other free resources is a great way to start if you have a limited budget).
Many artists sell their work online or through local events and gain a growing reputation that allows them to sell pieces for higher prices or take on valuable commissions, but even for someone who loves baking artisan bread, being creative is a strong part of the reason to work from home alongside the profit. Typical earnings $1.2K-12.5K
5. Home and Useful Services
Almost anyone can pick up a batch of domestic products and start a cleaning company, servicing the needs of local homes and businesses. Anyone with a van and a love of animals can start taking pets for walks or doing home visits to keep people’s pets company when they are out.
While the pay might not be up there with more value-added service, it allows anyone to get a foot upon the business ladder, to learn the basics of marketing and customer service at their own time and pace, while building up contacts, friends and customers when (or if) they do want to expand the business. Typical earnings $6-10K
Whatever your skillset, wherever you live, there are plenty of opportunities to create a business from home that can match your ambition or passion.
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As an entrepreneur, your customers are the biggest pillar of your business. No matter your industry of domain, area of specialization, or even your business focus, they are the single most valuable asset to your organization and you should treat them as so.
Through their valuable feedback, your business can gain a new sense of direction, develop new concepts, as well as bring in more revenue. With that said, as a business owner, simply appreciating your customers isn’t enough. You need to truly understand them to tailor your products and services to meet them at their point of need. And that’s where Salesforce application development comes in.
It entails creating integrated customer relationship management solutions that interface businesses with their customers. These CRM platforms also give all the departments in a particular organization a unified view of all the customers and how they interact with various aspects of the business.
In this article, we are going to look at what Salesforce is and its uses. While at it, we are also going to delve deeper to see the entire Salesforce application development lifecycle.
What Is Salesforce?
Simply put, it’s a cloud computing SaaS company that provides customer relationship management (CRM) solutions. Thanks to the company’s cloud technology, businesses are able to better connect with their existing clientele, partners, and potential customers.
Over the years, Salesforce software has grown to become the leading marketing and customer behavior tracking solution for both small startups and Fortune 500 companies. As it turns out, customer relationship management is one of the key driving factors for the increasing demand for application development in Salesforce.
Recent research from Vonage offered a compelling view of the effects and consequences of poor customer service. In the US alone, the research revealed that an estimated $62 billion is lost annually as a result of bad customer experience.
To underwrite this figure, a different report from Huffpost has indicated that 91% of customers won’t hesitate to switch brands once they experience bad customer service. These are mind-blowing figures, especially if a business has no solution to counter the consequences of poor customer experience.
However, with Salesforce in place, businesses are able to overcome the problems caused by poor customer service and other business process variables. According to statistics published on Salesforce’s website, companies that are currently using their software have continued to see average increases in multiple areas. For instance, 34% of users have seen an increase in customer satisfaction, with 27% and 32% users seeing an increase in sales revenues and lead conversion respectively.
In 2018, Salesforce emerged as the biggest CRM software commanding a total of 19.8% market share of the CRM software market. During the same period, the company was voted as the #1 CRM provider by the International Data Corporation. It shouldn't come as a surprise that companies are willing to pay the highest Salesforce consultant salary just to get wind of this technology.
The Benefits of Using Salesforce
Given the commendable portfolio of Salesforce, here are areas it can help your business find success. Below I am going to discuss the benefits of using Salesforce.
Helps Collect Customer Intel
In the prevailing competitive business environment, overlooking data collection can be a fatal and unforgiving mistake. As a business, collecting and collating customer intelligence should be an obsession or the very least treated as a full-time affair, because it can lead to loss of revenue. As such, if you are to improve customer satisfaction and continue remaining competitive, hiring qualified Salesforce developers to build a high-quality CRM tool is inevitable.
And with Salesforce, you get an upper hand over your competitors by enjoying tools that help you identify, understand, and solve customer problems.
Flexible And Scalable
As companies and business needs continue to evolve, the tools of trade must also adapt. For instance, if the structures of your business start to grow, the management software should be able to seamlessly accommodate the changes. Cognizant of this fact, Salesforce CRM comes with multiple functions that allow for scalability right from the initial stages to any future interactions.
Helps in Account Planning
Having a unified view of customer information allows your teams to independently make plans for various accounts. It also facilitates a more hands-on customer connection approach as well as allows various reps and departments in your organization to modify their plans for optimized results. Salesforce also comes with a to-do items feature, which helps your entire workforce stay organized throughout the day.
Along with that, Salesforce also works as an organizational tool. Your team can create calendar reminders specifying the future customer follow-ups or important duties reminders to the upper management, which helps prevent anything from falling through the cracks.
If you are in the service-based businesses, Salesforce also gives you insights into the amount of time a particular customer/s has stayed in a particular subscription package. Once this info is established, your team is able to customize marketing materials to match a particular customer niche.
Cloud Connectivity
Many companies are now gravitating towards software as a service (SaaS), which means software that is available online. Luckily, Salesforce doesn’t need to be installed on a computer as it is cloud-based. This means that you can easily access it everywhere, interface it with other digitized services, and enjoy unlimited storage capacity. And since no maintenance is required, you get to save on a Salesforce developer salary that would have otherwise been paid for this purpose.
Facilitates Team Collaboration
Poor team communication and collaboration can lead to reduced productivity. On top of a unified view of customer data, Salesforce’s “Chatter” feature allows your team members to easily and regularly communicate work-related information. Additionally, the feature also lets you highlight and prioritize urgent issues that require special attention by inviting different team members to look at them.
Salesforce Application Development Lifecycle
Software developers spend a lot of time designing, developing, securing, and delivering products that perform better than initially envisioned. As a result, different software development approaches like agile development, waterfall model, and many others have merged.
When it comes to cloud-based solutions, the incorporation and implementation of various software development methodologies make it even more complex. Moreover, the Salesforce Development Lifecycle also means that the software is developed, tested, and deployed in a cloud environment.
Below, we have laid down 6 steps that clearly illustrate the entire Salesforce Development Lifecycle:
Business Requirements Analysis
The first step towards a successful custom Salesforce application is to conduct an internal business needs analysis. It entails the development team eliciting the potential customer needs, elaborating them, validating all the assumptions, and devising efficient methodologies to meet these requirements.
Business requirements analysis is important as it helps avert potential mistakes as well as make the final product both efficient and compatible with the existing system and security standards.
UI/UX Design
Another important aspect of Salesforce application development is optimizing the app for user experience. A report by iMPACT indicates that 52% of customers are less likely to conduct business with a brand offering a poor mobile experience. On the other hand, Forbes conservative estimates indicate that intentional and strategic user experience can yield a conversion rate as high as 400%.
If these numbers are anything to go by, designing a user-friendly and highly responsive Salesforce application development is absolutely paramount. In order to optimize an app for effective and enjoyable use, developers need to map out the user journey and creatively choreograph user/platform interactions to benefit the end-user.
Development Phase
The next step in Salesforce application development entails creating developers creating isolated sandboxes. Generally, these distinct sandboxes hold the main production app copy and other supplementary Salesforce configuration information. They are also independent, implying that changes in a single sandbox don’t affect the main Salesforce production enterprise. Individual developers have to clone their branches.
To retrieve the metadata from the sandboxes to the IDE, the developers need to use Force.com IDE. Once they have the metadata, they continue coding their assigned app features, performing initial unit testing, and then submit the finished code to the Git repository.
If a subsequent developer wants to build on top of this freshly updated branch, they need to clone it to their sandbox and continue developing new features. Once done, they also have to submit their latest development to the repository.
With that said, the possibility of multiple developers working on the same branch cant be overlooked. To avoid conflicts, it is important for everyone in the development team to check for possible branch updates before committing.
Testing
The next step after building a Salesforce application is to ensure that it has an excellent and stable performance. This mainly entails developers carrying out QA activities including unit tests and code reviews. It is also at this stage that functional, performance, and integration testing is conducted within the development process.
Lastly, automation tests and debugging are conducted to augment the app’s speedy delivery.
Integration
During the integration phase, the custom CRM application is interfaced with third-party software like CMS. To facilitate a smooth transition, the development team also conduct hands-on training sessions as well as provides training materials to the client.
Launch
Once the app is launched for internal use, it is transferred to the client and subjected to their User Acceptance Testing environment (UAT). Once satisfied, the finished product is moved to the production environment and deployed to the end-users.
Salesforce Application Development Team Actors
During the app development process, different players are involved and handle different aspects of the app. In the Salesforce app development life cycle, the most common actors include:
Product Manager: Help finalize business requirements.
Release Manager: Help coordinate the app’s release schedule.
Software Developer: Handles the main coding and produces the requisite deliverables.
Quality Analyst: Tests and confirms the functionality of various app features.
Potential money from the Salesforce AppExchange development:
After researching the fact this has been seen that Potential money from the salesforce AppExchange development can depend on several other factors.
How To Build an App for Salesforce AppExchange?
To build your AppExchange app, you must go through the multi-step procedure, which includes compliance, release, ongoing support, and demand app development. Below, I will discuss how to create an App for Salesforce AppExchange.
1st Step: Become the Part of Salesforce Business Partner Community
The first and foremost step in becoming a Salesforce AppExchange trade Partner is to join the Salesforce Partner Community. In this case, you must submit the form using AppExchange. After all, the Salesforce Partner Community is the hub of existing AppExchange Partners.
2nd Step: Examine AppExchange Market
The next step in building the app is to examine the AppExchange market. AppExchange offers many products and solutions for several products and cloud services in Salesforce. In this case, for optimal outcomes, you must use the curated collections of AppExchange.
3rd Step: Make the First Sketches of Your Product
Once you are done researching the existing solutions on AppExchange, you must start defining the unique value proposition of your product. For the outline, you must follow the below-mentioned procedure such as:
Firstly, you must understand your target audience.
Secondly, ensure you have an idea of business targets.
Thirdly, you must follow the types of Salesforce editions you will support.
After that, ensure you have an idea of the package type.
Next, ensure you have the Salesforce Licenses that you want to use.
Lastly, it would help if you ensured the requirements for your AppExchange App security.
4th Step: Define the Type of ISV Partnership and the Type Of Your AppExchange Solution
Once you have joined the Salesforce Partner Community, then, you must analyze the existing products, and you can create a rough roadmap. In this case, ensure you have defined the type of ISV partnership, and consequently, you also have built the AppExchange solution.
There are seven types of ISV partners in AppExchange. It includes OEM, CDP Cloud Partner, Commerce Cloud Partner, All Other Clouds (paid), All Other Clouds (free), and Technology Partner/Tableau.
5th Step: Choose the Programming Type and Tools to Build Your Salesforce App
Recently, Salesforce provided two types of programming languages and two types of tools that you can use. Let’s know what programming tools are used in Salesforce App development. This includes Apex Cloud-based programming language. Next are Lightning components and Visualforce.
6th Step: Build Your Salesforce App
Once you can identify the exact type of solution, it must have the programming language, licensing, and packaging, and of course, you must continue with the building procedure.
Two ways to do this are using internal sources or outsourcing the dedicated team. If you want to build the SalesForce App using an in-house team, it could be one the most viable and remarkable options. If you don’t have enough resources, ensure you can control the entire product cycle of AppExchange.
7th Step: Test Your Salesforce App
If you want to ensure optimal performance, then it must conduct comprehensive end-to-end testing in technological domains. In this case, you must adhere to the development of best business practices, especially for testing.
8th Step: Prepare Your App for the Launch on AppExchange
Once you are done testing and finalizing the app, the next step is to prepare by submitting it to the SalesForce AppExchange. In this procedure, it includes creating the managed packages and providing screenshots.
9th Step: Submit Your App for Security Review and Market This
Ensure you have submitted your final app by undergoing the security review and then have met the necessary security requirements.
Final Thoughts
Salesforce CRM is a critical business tool. It helps streamline data analysis and reporting, provides invaluable customer feedback, and aid in formulating better customer service strategies. As a result, businesses are able to align their resources towards creating timely, customer-oriented solutions.
With that said, Salesforce application development isn’t a linear process. It entails working with different tools and multiple software development methodologies. And with cloud solutions continuing to capture the imaginations of business owners, the world is yet to see the full potential of CRM Salesforce and the cloud ecosystem as a whole.
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