Salesforce Data Cloud

Salesforce Data Cloud, formerly Salesforce Customer Data Platform (CDP), is a unified data platform designed to consolidate customer data from multiple sources, giving businesses a 360-degree view of their customers. This helps in creating more personalized marketing, sales, and service experiences.

Data Cloud's data management approach mirrors objectives of a data lake, with the capability to centralize large volumes of diverse data sources, supporting advanced analytics, leveraging AI, and real-time decision-making processes. 

It's worth noting that data cloud is primarily focused on customer-related data and experiences compared to a traditional data lake, which is more agnostic of the nature of stored data, is often designed to store vast amounts of raw data, including logs, IoT data streams, unstructured data, and more, for use cases beyond CRM and customer analytics.

While Salesforce Data Cloud might not be a "big data processing platform" in the traditional sense, like Apache Hadoop or Spark, it incorporates several elements essential for big data processing within the context of customer data management. Its focus remains on providing businesses with tools to unify, analyze, and activate their customer data at scale, incorporating big data strategies to enhance customer experiences and operational efficiency through a combination of integration capabilities, AI-powered analytics, real-time data processing, and the scalability of a cloud-native platform.

Native 1st party and 3rd party connectors enable real-time data ingestion from various Salesforce apps and external sources, Data from different sources in ingested via Data Streams and mapped as Data Lake Objects and finally to Data Model Objects. The Customer 360 Data Model organizes similar data model objects (DMOs) together into data model subject areas to help understand and use the data model. 

The ingested customer data from various sources is then unified via Identity Resolution to create a single view of customer dynamically and then segmented as target datasets to use for personalized engagement across different channels. Finally, activate your data with Calculated Insights.

Sources: Salesforce Architects