What is Salesforce Data Cloud?

What is Data Cloud?

Don't let the product name fool you. While "Data Cloud" combines two common tech terms, Salesforce's offering is far from ordinary. It addresses the headache of managing disconnected customer data while providing adaptive ways to understand and exploit that data. But before exploring how it benefits your organization, let's overview what the product is all about.

So, what is Data Cloud, and how can it help your business? Simply put, it's a platform that unifies and harmonizes all your customer data to create a single, comprehensive view of your customer. Once this unified profile is established, Data Cloud leverages it for various purposes: generating insights, business intelligence, AI predictions, and activating data across multiple channels. These channels include other Salesforce applications, BI tools, ad tech, and third-party platforms.

Salesforce has long promised a Customer 360 view, but Data Cloud is particularly relevant today as companies struggle to manage and make sense of hundreds of data sources. Data Cloud's core strength lies in its ability to ingest massive amounts of data from multiple sources, harmonize and unify it, and then leverage it for actionable insights and activations.

The 4 Main Value Propositions of Salesforce Data Cloud

Salesforce Data Cloud delivers value through four key pillars:

Connect: Ingest data from any source—Salesforce apps, mobile, web, connected devices, and legacy systems—in real time or batch.
Harmonize: Map and model data to the standard Cloud Information Model (CIM) to create a unified view of your customer.
Unify: Resolve customer identities across disparate data sources to build a single, golden customer profile.
Act: Activate data to power personalized experiences, drive workflows, and inform AI models across the entire customer journey.

Let's look at an example. Imagine I want to identify customers who aren't engaging with marketing channels or making purchases so customer reps can intervene. Data Cloud ingests engagement data from Marketing Cloud emails, product clicks from the website, and purchase history from the CRM. This data is harmonized into a structured model and segmented to identify non-engaged customers. A task is then automatically created for Sales Reps in Sales Cloud. This is just one of endless possibilities, but it offers a glimpse into Data Cloud's potential.

How does it work?

As you have no doubt already noticed the data follows a standard life-cycle in Data Cloud. Let's go a bit deeper and break down these phases a bit further.

Click on the arrow below to step through the different stages of the data in life-cycle in Data Cloud

Connect and Ingest

The first step in building a unified model is to connect your data sources. Multiple options are available for these connections. There are preconfigured connectors from common cloud providers, AWS, Azure, Snowflake, Google, and also for first party apps from Salesforce, such as Sales Cloud, Commerce and Marketing Cloud. This list isn’t exhaustive and they are adding new connector updates with every release. If the out of the box connectors don’t fit your business landscape then Data Cloud gives the possibility to ingest the data with its ingestion APIs.

Harmonize

Data Cloud then maps the incoming data to a standardised Customer 360 data model. Don’t worry the model can be customised, but it gives everyone a common data foundation that applies best practices and also allows future extensibility for specific business needs.

Unify

The centrepiece of the platform is the unification process that brings together different data records and performs identity resolution allowing a single source of truth for the customer profile. Data Cloud provides the possibility to specify what rules are used to create the unified profile and also the preferred data sources.

Analyse and Predict

This is where the data crunching and insights happen, providing lots of options to the data hungry analysts. Calculated Insights are the workhorses of the platform, capable of performing complex aggregations on unified data through click-based tools or using SQL. Streaming insights provide Real-time data streams that can be calculated and aggregated bringing personalisation to a new level. Alongside the calculated and streaming insights Data Cloud also provides integration with Tableau and Datarama.

Additionally, there is the AI functionality that allows you to use your own models or use the No Code AI model provided by Salesforce. This is one area where Salesforce is investing a lot of time and energy, so watch this space.

Act

Finally we can act on the data, making all our efforts worthwhile. Different types of activations are possible. The Salesforce platform can be triggered using Flow and Apex classes. Marketing Cloud can have customer data sent to it in real time or when the insights are calculated. Also external systems can be leveraged to receive the Data Cloud data.

Where to next?

So there you have it. With the ever increasing challenges of colossal data volumes, data complexity, siloed organisations, and then the question of how to exploit this data, Salesforce has developed Data Cloud to respond to these needs.

While the power of the platform is readily available to Data Cloud clients, there is nevertheless the challenge of how to use it to its fullest potential. This is why we have developed two offer types that can assist in the understanding of how Data Cloud can bring value to your organisation. For more details have a look at our Discovery Offers. Additionally, we are developing a library of potential use cases that could be applied to companies that share similar types of needs. Please refer to our Data Cloud Use Cases.