Hyperforce Has Lift Off
It's time for the next major Salesforce platform migration. Hyperforce has been around for several years, and now existing customers will get the benefits.
Salesforce are in the early stages of another major platform migration. This one is purely a backend change, but Salesforce admins should still check for any customisations that may break when they are migrated to the Hyperforce infrastructure.
The migration from Salesforce Classic to Salesforce Lightning feels like it happened only yesterday. Yet, it actually wrapped up three years ago. For many Salesforce admins, the total revamp of the Salesforce UI was highly disruptive, even if users didn't really share that pain. Yet, no sooner was the Lightning migration complete then Salesforce started the countdown to their next major platform migration.
The new Hyperforce architecture was announced in 2020, and is part of a plan to shift Salesforce infrastructure onto public cloud services such as AWS. That has significant cost benefits to Salesforce, as well as allowing more flexibility in where Salesforce instances are hosted. That's not to say that Salesforce are closing all their first party data centres, they're not. Some products and regions still haven't been made available on the Hyperforce architecture. The vision is that the majority of Salesforce users will have been moved to public cloud hosting within the next couple of years.
Migration
A few months ago, Salesforce released a Hyperforce assistant tool to prepare users for the eventual migration of their instances to the new backend. That tool has now reached general availability. Hyperforce is only a backend change with limited user impact. However, admins that have heavily customised their Salesforce instance should check if there are server-specific dependencies in their customisations. Also, things like certificates and IP addresses will change, which may have downstream impacts on IT teams.
Some Salesforce customers may not have to wait long before their instance is transferred to the architecture. I'm already seeing many low usage instances being migrated this year. Typically, the migrations are scheduled for new release maintenance windows, such as the one for next month's Winter '24 release. Larger and more complex instances will have to wait much longer, just as they did with the Classic to Lightning migration.
Winter Release
In the interim, there is still plenty for Salesforce admins to be doing. The Winter release is as packed as ever, even if it lacks a headline-grabbing new feature. There are a lot of smaller enhancements that affect opportunities (with split opps being a particular focus in this release), related lists and the customisation experience.
Salesforce Admins also should start preparing for the impending changes to user profiles by documenting their existing profiles and permission sets. There are some permission-related enhancements in this release, but the big changes aren't due to begin rolling out until Spring 24, with the final removal of permissions from profiles happening in Spring 26. The permission changes will result in user management becoming significantly simpler, but preparing for the change will require a lot of work.