REA Group Signed 2-Year Deal With Odaseva

REA Group Ltd, a publicly-traded real estate company with more than 3,000 employees working across Australia, Asia, and North America, has signed a 2-year deal with Odaseva.com, Inc., a data protection platform for Salesforce, to backup its 114 million records and secure them with encryption.

Rea Group Signed 2 Year Deal With Odaseva

The group’s aim is to change how the world experiences property, and to improve buying, selling, and renting experiences for people in India, China, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, and other countries. Their technology helps people during every stage of the property experience through rich content, data and insights, property valuation estimates, and home financing solutions.

Salesforce is at the heart of REA Group’s Australian operations, which uses sales cloud, service cloud, and revenue cloud. Their main org is the core sales and CRM system for the company. A smaller but mighty leads org manages ratings and reviews for their highly-valued real estate agents and agencies, which is crucial for conveying genuine experiences to website visitors.

While scaling up their use of Salesforce, REA Group realized their DR plan required a backup and restore solution that offered encryption, while also ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements and internal policies. That meant storing the data within Australian borders per data residency requirements, and keeping customer data for 7 years.

Why Odaseva
Security that surpasses industry standards: REA Group prioritized security when selecting a data management solution.

“Odaseva’s level of encryption is above industry standard,” says Mark Laing, senior Salesforce administrator, REA Group and an Odaseva power-user, referring to Odaseva’s five-level encryption.

Backup and restore was the primary need REA Group sought to fulfill, and Odaseva’s backup and restore solution exceeded expectations there too.

“I’m able to backup not just our production org, but also our dev pipeline. Since Odaseva allows me to backup sandboxes, I’m not having to rebuild sandboxes from scratch if anything gets lost,” said Laing.

And REA Group’s sandboxes are secured with more than just powerful backup and restore, because Odaseva’s Sandbox Anonymization also protects Personal Identifiable Information (PII) in these developer environments. By anonymizing PII stored in sandboxes, dev teams can test and develop using realistic data sets, while eliminating risks associated with moving sensitive data.

Complying with data residency laws was another major factor in choosing the right Salesforce data management solution.

“We also required a vendor that was able to have the data stored in Australia, which Odaseva could do,” says Laing. “Not many other vendors had that, so it was a big standout straight away.“

Solution: Protection that uses minimal resources

Data Protection: Backup and Restore
Data Privacy: Sandbox Anonymization
Data Automation: Cloud Replication

Outcome: Saving time for busy admin team
Odaseva is a core part of REA Group’s DR plan, and helps them secure data for the 12+ million Australians that use realestate.com.au each month and the 16 other brands in REA Group’s network.

The REA Group Salesforce admin team saves valuable time on critical data management processes too.

“Once the initial setup is done it’s so easy to keep things maintained,” says Laing. “It takes 20% of the time of any other backup solution than I’ve had to deal with in the past to maintain, govern, and audit it. I do audits and checks, but for the most part I’m able to spend time on other things.“

Another time-saver for Laing’s team is the self-service Odaseva learning portal, which he says speeds up training for new members of REA Group’s admin team.

“Dealing with Odaseva is probably one of the best vendors I’ve dealt with. Customer success and sales are so helpful, and quick to get back to you, and willing to help. Some companies are very rigid but I’ve found that with Odaseva, they’re always open to having a discussion no matter what the ask is. And Odaseva has a really good support structure – If I log a case, they’re very quickly onto the case,” concluded Laing.