Risk Management: The New Requisite for Everyone in the Salesforce Ecosystem

Risk management has long been a part of every corporate strategy but never achieved the center stage that it has today. A robust risk management framework has become imperative and more relevant for many organizations’ business-critical systems such as Salesforce.

There are two possible contexts of risk management in Salesforce:
1) Risk management against digital disruptions and data security threats
2) Risk management involved in a Salesforce project

Risk Management Against Cyber Risks and Digital Disruptions

Although cloud platforms are comparatively better-protected (but not immune) against cyber risks than those on-premises, the ‘risk’ factor looms larger over any conviction. But there’s no way to get away with digital and operational disruptions, thus, making risk management a necessity.

Risk management, comprising incident management and disaster recovery as its two pillars, is about being proactive rather than being reactive. No organization can be sure against cyber risks but they can be sure of being prepared to tackle any situation that may occur at any time.

What Matters the Most in a Robust Risk Management Framework

What matters the most are resilience and continuity of business-functioning during a crisis. You should prepare for the impact of an incident on your organization’s ability to do anything else while you turn your focus and attention to a crisis.

Auditing Your Organization’s Risk Management Readiness

What will you gain from auditing the risk management capabilities of your organization?

Well, it will give you confidence. Studying the resilience of your Salesforce Org helps you realize where and how your system might break and what its impact would be elsewhere, as a result of which, you will be able to strategize to deal with an incident and recovery. Also, you will get a clear picture of where you need to invest.

Where to Start

The first thing you must do is to bring all of your customer data together. This will help you get a clear perspective, act in collaboration, and pay heed to the ongoing management and maintenance of those proactive and reactive measures. This will ultimately help you ensure a quick and effective response whenever a crisis occurs.

Chaos testing is also a boon for ensuring a resilient Salesforce Org and better risk management. Haven’t heard about it yet?

Risk Management Involved in a Salesforce Project

Using an agile platform for your business is great but it has its downfalls as well on the implementation side. It is a half-truth that agile platforms remain stable irrespective of the number or speed of changes. Deploying Salesforce projects takes planning to be effective, otherwise, you expose your project to a variety of risks that could derail your plans and goals.

That’s where risk management comes into the picture. Risk management is the process of identifying, assessing, and addressing project risk. This is a proactive exercise, as risks may or may not occur. But if they do, you’ll be glad you prepared for them.

Risks involved in Salesforce Projects

• Bad Data
• Lack of Adoption
• Difficult Release Deployments Roll-Back
• Change Management and Deployment

The Balance of Agility and Stability is Key

Overcoming and balancing the ‘Agility-Stability’ paradox is possible with the right people, process, and technology. If you have that, great! Otherwise, a trusted Salesforce consulting partner becomes an absolute imperative.

Having a partner whom you can rely upon can address all three dimensions involved with risk:

• Probability: The likelihood that the risk happens.
• Impact: How risk affects the scope, schedule, and cost of a project.
• Proximity: How soon will the risk happen, given the length of the project.

Bottom Line

The bottom line here is that risk management is a daily activity. You need ways to streamline your tasks so that they don’t take up your whole day. And you definitely don’t want your users to spend their whole day managing risks.

That’s where having a Salesforce consulting partner helps. Not just with the risk management, but ensuring smooth project deliveries and maximizing ROI from Salesforce.

Want to discuss risk management for your Salesforce Org? Let’s talk strategy.