Combat Your Cloud Data Security Challenges With Salesforce

In today’s digital world, businesses are using advanced technology to optimize business processes, identify new revenue opportunities, and create unique experiences for each customer. Owing to this, the popularity of the customer relationship management (CRM) platform has become a norm with countless vendors and solutions competing for market share. But to truly compete in the digital age, it’s not enough to just have a CRM but a comprehensive Cloud-CRM.

Cloud – once a trendy, sci-fi-sounding buzzword has become an inescapable part of our everyday lives and a key mechanism in digital transformation. As cloud technology has become widely used, businesses, in particular, are discovering that cloud is the way to become agile, reduce operational costs, and a much more reliable option for storing data securely.

However, that’s not always the case. In the recent past, cloud data breaches have become way too common. And now that most of your customer information is living on the cloud, you simply can’t treat that data as anything less than a priority because if that’s lost so is your customers’ trust in your brand.

To ensure that your data is truly secure in the cloud you must invest in a technology that is committed to data security. One such Cloud-CRM provider that has established dominance over this market is Salesforce and not just as a powerful platform but one that safeguards your data from unauthorized access to external users and inappropriate usage by your own users.

Let’s understand how Salesforce ensures data security in the cloud.

How Does Salesforce Ensure Security in the Cloud?

Salesforce is leading the marathon in cloud-based CRM and they understand the need for a secure cloud. To build trust among their customers, Salesforce ensures secure solutions by incorporating a range of security tools into every service they provide.

The Architecture of Salesforce’s Security

1. Security Infrastructure

If you are accessing any application using a Salesforce-supported browser, Transport Layer Security (TLS) technology can be your best bet to protect your information. With this technology, you get server authentication and encryption to secure your data and ensure that it is available only to the registered users present in your organization.

2. Security Health Check

To validate your security posture, your admin can use the Health Check feature to identify vulnerabilities in your security settings and fix them. You get a summary score that reflects your Org’s performance against a security baseline, like the Salesforce Baseline Standard. Additionally, you can use your own custom baseline, if you wish to, instead of the Salesforce Baseline Standard.

However, user-introduced vulnerabilities are a big threat because security solutions are only as effective as the employees who use them. This is why Salesforce has tools to identify vulnerabilities, such as password leaks, network configurations, and session settings.

And if you need some advanced security in your custom applications, you can count on Salesforce.

Salesforce offers the following capabilities with every app designed on the platform:

• Cloud security intelligence
• Intelligent prevention
• Encryption
• Auditing capabilities

3. Salesforce Shield

Salesforce Shield offers security to the users with the three robust tools:

• Shield Platform Encryption
• Event Monitoring
• Field Audit Trail

Together these tools can be your admins and developers’ best bet to construct additional levels of trust, compliance, and governance into apps.

The triad of security tools are:

4. Data Mask

Data Mask offers a great way to mask sensitive data in full or partial sandboxes. Additionally, you get the flexibility to set different levels of masking, based on the sensitivity of your data.

5. Einstein Data Detect

Einstein Data Detect enables you to identify sensitive data within your Salesforce Org so that you can take the right steps to protect it. It leverages a platform-native technology thus, terminating the reliance on third-party services or moving your data outside of Salesforce.

Salesforce continues to implement best practices and security technologies to protect its ecosystem and guard your data against vulnerabilities in code when you create any custom applications for your business.

The powerful duo of Apex and Visualforce pages allows Lightning Platform developers to provide custom functionality and business logic to Salesforce or create a completely new product in the Lightning Platform. However, as with any programming language, there are potential security-related threats. That’s why Salesforce has added security defenses right into their Lightning Platform.

They are:

Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)

XSS attacks are when malicious HTML or client-side scripts are provided to a web app. In the Lightning Platform, there are several anti-XSS defenses in place.

– Filters have been implemented to pin down harmful characters in most output methods.
– By default, nearly all Visualforce tags avoid the XSS-vulnerable characters.

Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)

CSRF attacks are when the end-user is forced to execute undesirable actions on a web app for which they’re currently authenticated.

– In the Lightning Platform, you have anti-CSRF tokens to prevent this attack.

Trust and Transparency: The Two Pillars of Salesforce for Security in the Cloud

Apart from a solid infrastructure, Salesforce has time and again taken cloud security up a notch. Trust and transparency are at the forefront of all that Salesforce does and they’ve also created a resource to help increase transparency with their solutions.

Salesforce provides Salesforce Trust – a real-time community hub. This community depicts the security status of every Salesforce platform and gives you easy access to see how safe your data is. It has real-time data on Salesforce system performance, security, incident reports, and any ongoing maintenance.

Additionally, resources, like the ‘Power of Us’ Hub, are present to connect and educate users to better understand both their data and how Salesforce protects that data.

This approach is a testament to how they are ensuring security with transparency and trust.

The Salesforce Data Security Model

Today, data security is an integral part of organizations across the globe. For a solid security structure, Salesforce has a robust security model that secures and verifies data at every possible corner.

The Data Security Model is divided into four tiers:

1. Organization Level
2. Objects Level
3. Field Level
4. Record Level

Let’s decode what they are.

1. Organization Level:

The organizational level gives you the flexibility to determine when and from where your users can access systems.

– IP Restrictions:

Use Trusted IP Ranges so that you can limit your user’s ability to log in only when they are in a particular location, like your corporate office. If you want to activate IP range restrictions, you need to modify your Salesforce implementation. Additionally, you can also set IP Restrictions on individual User Profiles.

– Login Access:

Get the ability to specify and limit the hours when users can log in depending on their profile.

– Password Policies:

Specify the amount of time before all users’ passwords expire and the level of complexity required for passwords.

2. Object Level Security:

Object-level security is about introducing constraints on how users access object-level data.

– Profile:

Security is determined by the profile assigned to a particular user. Profile manages Objects that a user can see and what they could do to control these Objects. You can use settings like Create, Read, Edit, Delete to control Objects.

– Permission Sets:

These are used to provide additional permissions to users who are already assigned a profile.

3. Field Level Security:

Field level security enables you to restrict access, however, it doesn’t allow you to grant access.

4. Record Level Security:

Allow specific users to view an object while restricting the individual object records from them so that they can’t view it.

There are 4 different ways of how you can control record-level sharing:

1. Organization-Wide Sharing Defaults:

The creator/owner of a record will have complete access to a record. Use organization-wide defaults to restrict access to data. Additionally, use other record-level security and sharing tools (role hierarchies, sharing rules, and manual sharing) to grant access to the data for users who need it.

2. Role Hierarchy:

Users can use role hierarchy settings to access data, edit data, and report all data that is owned or shared with users who are right underneath them in the role hierarchy.

3. Sharing Rules:

Use sharing rules to expand sharing access to users in public groups or roles. For instance, if you have two parallel roles in the role hierarchy, North-Region Sales, and West-Region Sales, you can establish a sharing rule to give visibility to each other’s leads.

4. Manual Sharing:

Utilize manual sharing features to handle cases carefully where access is to be given for a particular record to a specific user.

Salesforce’s Security Roadmap for 2022

Today the world is in a hybrid model and developing dependence on digital systems. And with the ever-increasing rise of digital threats, businesses need to up their game when it comes to protecting their data.

Salesforce has already implemented a solid architecture for security. Not just that, they’ve embraced the best of security methods to cover the whole nine yards of threats and vulnerabilities across its products to ensure that its customers’ data remains safe.

And they’re leaving no stone unturned to ensure data security in the cloud in the future too, even if it’s with the simplest of methods.

From February 01, 2022, Salesforce will require all customers to enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) to access Salesforce products. This is one of the simplest and most effective ways to secure your data. MFA makes it easy to dodge common threats like phishing attacks and account takeovers.

Salesforce is consistently prioritizing cloud security and incorporating new ways to tackle the rising threats so that any organization can be ready for the future.