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.