Zero-Copy Connectivity in Salesforce Data Cloud

For years, enterprise data strategies have revolved around one thing: copying. Every new system—whether a CRM, a Customer Data Platform (CDP), or an analytics tool—demanded its own version of the truth. Data was extracted, transformed, and loaded again and again, until the same dataset existed in half a dozen silos. It seemed like progress at first: data was “available” everywhere. But the cost of this model has been staggering.

Each copy created another set of pipelines to maintain, another compliance risk, and another version of truth that inevitably drifted from the source. Storage bills ballooned. Data engineering teams turned into ticket factories, constantly fixing sync jobs. And executives were left asking the same frustrating question: which number can we actually trust?

That hidden tax—the tax of duplication—has been the background noise of digital transformation for decades.

The pushback began in the data warehousing world. Companies like Snowflake popularized the term “zero-copy” with their secure data sharing feature, which allowed organizations to share and query data across accounts without making physical copies. Later, the Composable CDP movement—led by players like Hightouch, Census, GrowthLoop, and RudderStack—extended the idea into marketing and customer data. Their pitch was simple but disruptive: activate data directly from the warehouse where it lives, instead of duplicating it into yet another platform.

Salesforce’s Zero-Copy Connectivity in Data Cloud is the next evolution of this idea. By embedding zero-copy principles into the CRM operating system itself, Salesforce is bringing the philosophy of “move less, do more” into the very workflows where sales, service, and marketing teams live every day.

Traditional copy-based architecture leads to silo sprawl and cost overhead.

The New Play: Move Less, Do More

In recent years, a new philosophy emerged. Instead of building yet another silo to house yet another copy, why not work with the data where it already lives? This idea, popularised by so-called Composable CDPs like Hightouch, Census, GrowthLoop, and RudderStack, flipped the script. Rather than sucking data out of Snowflake, Databricks, or BigQuery, these platforms connected directly to the warehouse and activated audiences, campaigns, or workflows in place.

The model resonated. Enterprises had invested millions in building lakes and warehouses that were already the “source of truth.” Copying data elsewhere no longer made sense. A zero-copy approach did.

Salesforce’s Zero-Copy Connectivity in Data Cloud takes this idea further. It doesn’t just connect to the data—it embeds zero-copy into the fabric of the CRM operating system itself. That means the very platform where your sales, service, and marketing teams already work can query your warehouse in real time, use that data for segmentation or AI prompts, and then push curated CRM insights back into the warehouse as secure, governed views.

Salesforce Zero-Copy Connectivity brings federation and sharing into the CRM OS itself.

What Zero-Copy Actually Means

Here’s how it works in practice. Instead of ingesting a daily copy of your warehouse data into Salesforce, Data Cloud issues live SQL queries against Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, or Redshift. When you need to resolve identities, build a segment, or feed context into an AI agent, it retrieves only the rows required—nothing more.

And it’s not just inbound. With zero-copy sharing, Salesforce can expose CRM data—accounts, cases, or calculated insights—back into your warehouse as secure views. Analysts, data scientists, and machine learning teams can use this data immediately, in the same tools they already rely on, without waiting for an export job or batch file.

The old mindset was “move the data to where the app lives.” Zero-copy reverses that logic: “let the apps come to the data.”

Why This Matters: Solving Pain Points We’ve Normalized

This shift directly addresses problems enterprises have quietly accepted as “the cost of doing business.” Copy sprawl and the delays it introduces vanish when systems query the source of truth in real time. Soaring data movement costs shrink as ETL pipelines and duplicate storage are eliminated. Governance improves because policies and lineage are enforced once—at the source—rather than across a tangle of copies. And perhaps most importantly, AI systems grounded in live, governed data are far less likely to hallucinate, unlocking reliable, real-time personalization.

The business impact is hard to overstate. In a traditional copy-based model, enterprises spend millions annually on cloud storage, ETL jobs, and pipeline maintenance. Zero-copy connectivity slashes those line items while also reducing people costs—freeing up engineers from pipeline firefighting and returning them to higher-value work.

 Zero-Copy cuts costs across ETL, storage duplication, and compliance overhead.

The Bigger Story

Salesforce’s product pages will tell you about federation and sharing, but the real story goes deeper. Zero-copy is as much about strategy as it is about architecture.

There’s a financial dimension: less duplication means not just lower infrastructure costs, but also a greener, more sustainable data footprint. There’s a revenue dimension: freshness translates into higher conversions, because personalization finally happens in the moment that matters. There’s a governance dimension: auditors and compliance teams prefer models where the data never leaves the governed platform of record. And there’s an AI dimension: the Trust Layer combined with zero-copy enables a new generation of AI agents that operate on real-time, trustworthy context instead of stale snapshots.

And let’s not forget the organizational impact. Zero-copy changes how teams work. Marketers and service ops no longer wait in line for engineering to copy over datasets; they can activate directly. Engineers stop babysitting brittle pipelines and instead focus on building scalable, innovative systems. The result is not just efficiency, but empowerment.

Where It Fits—and Where It Doesn’t

Zero-copy connectivity shines brightest in organizations that have invested heavily in modern data platforms like Snowflake, Databricks, or BigQuery. Imagine a global retailer that stores billions of e-commerce and point-of-sale transactions in Snowflake. Traditionally, they would schedule nightly ETL jobs to push this data into their CDP or CRM, meaning that a customer who abandoned a shopping cart at 8:00 p.m. might not trigger a follow-up email until the next day.

With zero-copy federation, Salesforce Data Cloud can query Snowflake in real time. That same abandoned cart can instantly feed into a segment, trigger a journey in Marketing Cloud, and even ground an AI agent in Service Cloud to proactively assist the customer—all without duplicating or moving the underlying dataset. Freshness translates directly into conversion and customer satisfaction.

But there are also cases where ingestion is still valuable. Consider a high-frequency trading firm where split-second latency makes or breaks a decision. Querying data across systems, even federated, may not deliver the microsecond precision required. In such scenarios, copying critical data into a dedicated in-memory system remains the right choice.

The key is not to treat zero-copy as a silver bullet, but as a powerful option in a continuum. Use it where freshness, governance, and efficiency matter most. Complement it with ingestion when your business needs demand extreme performance or highly specialized transformations

The Road Ahead: Toward “Zero-Copy Everywhere”

Zero-copy is not just a Salesforce story—it’s an industry trend. ServiceNow, Snowflake, Databricks, and AWS are all advancing their own zero-copy integrations. The next frontier will be even more interesting: intelligent optimizers that balance cost and latency automatically, cross-platform governance hubs that orchestrate policy across ecosystems, and agentic AI that is grounded in live, governed data by default.

Salesforce’s bet is clear. By combining data gravity (where your truth lives) with engagement gravity (where your teams and AI operate), it aims to become the control plane for customer data in an increasingly composable world.

Final Word

Zero-copy connectivity is not just another connector. It’s a new contract between applications and data: stop duplicating truth, start composing with it. For enterprises, that means lower costs, tighter governance, and fresher customer engagement. For Salesforce, it’s the bridge between the data platforms you’ve invested in and the AI-driven experiences your customers expect.

The future of data is not about moving more.
It’s about moving less—and doing more.