5 Best Practices for Extended Salesforce Data Protection

No one can guarantee that “Our Salesforce instance is 100% Secure”. The Salesforce data breach back in 2022 was the learning.

Even businesses with good ethical practices can be the victim of data loss incidents without proper management and protocols. Approximating the cost of a global data breach to be 4.45 million in 2023.

But as the old saying goes, “Nobody cares about the fire until there is smoke”.

Here are a few of the red flags that say that you are lacking best practices to protect your Salesforce Data:

• When organizations don’t have an infra to handle sensitive information
• If businesses are too dependent on ‌basic org-security provided by Salesforce
• Expanding services to new regions without much knowledge of local data laws
• In such cases, incident management can be challenging in case of a breach event
• Being overconfident and not revising data breach protocols often

Lastly, if you are entirely unaware of this fact – ‘Salesforce data protection is a shared responsibility between the provider & customer.’

Platform security in Salesforce is top-notch when it comes to the security in the design, and implementation of its infrastructure, platform, & applications. Customers being their closest affiliates, it believes that customers should also follow some minimum standards to maintain data quality, integrity, and gravity of their customer data to ensure 100% ownership & control.

This is a popular security & compliance framework known as the ‘Shared Responsibility Model’ in Salesforce which outlines the responsibility of Salesforce customers as a processor of the data vs their responsibility vs the Salesforce data security model to thrive as ‘one’ trusted system, in achieving customer success.

As data responsibilities vary across organizations, we asked our data experts what could be the best practices for Salesforce data protection that will attest to the ‘trust’ factor and defend against vulnerabilities like a suited superhero. And, here are the answers on how to be responsible, setting up priorities to improve Salesforce data governance and make you the unbeatable other half of the shared responsibility model in Salesforce data security.

5 Data-Friendly Advice to Uphold a Supreme Data Culture & Maximize Salesforce Data Protection

The perspective explores customer liability, uncovering key drivers of Salesforce data culture to maximize business resiliency. Here are the proposed and effective practices to improve your Salesforce data governance to protect customer data.

#1. Responding with the Least Privilege Approach

An estimated 23% of cloud security incidents are caused by misconfigurations. Therefore presetting ‌user privileges in Salesforce can help you run miles ahead in improving platform efficiency as a part of data protection.

Implementing the “Least Privilege” approach in Salesforce involves responding to situations with a minimal access strategy. This can include admin responsibilities to have a user library in advance to allow the necessary permissions required to view data in Salesforce. Hence minimizes the level of access thereby reducing the risk of unauthorized access or potential security breaches.

#2. Reducing Exposure by Principles of Data Minimisation 

This is more appropriate for businesses that want a stronger foothold on data resiliency for their Salesforce data retention plans. In a situation where they are holding over, let’s say 5 years old Salesforce data, it should better be –

Targeted: Sufficient to meet requirements to fulfill your stated purpose effectively

Relevant: Demonstrating a logical connection to that purpose

While storing only what is necessary: Retaining what is essential for ‌intended purposes like meeting data compliance requirements, internal business processes, or audits.

#3. Minimizing External Dependencies to Access Data

This exacts the situation where organizations often get delayed in responding to a data breach event, they have external dependencies to access the data backup for Salesforce. This further lengthens the RPO/RTO set by large businesses, cashing high on platform downtime. Their availability also plays a key role in protecting ‌Salesforce data, giving it better control over storage and faster response times.

#4. Expanding Security Privileges with Agile Compliance Management

According to IDC, 83% of cloud security breaches are caused by access-related vulnerabilities, especially in the media, healthcare, and utilities sectors.

Hence, as a data controller’s duty to safeguard Salesforce data, users need to ensure –

• Employ secure communication protocols throughout the data migration process.
• Ensure checking the audit logs regularly
• Advocate for the secure sourcing, deployment, and maintenance of third-party integrations and extensions
• Test the security of the application before any deployment
• Adhere to security standards and regulations based on the industry you belong and also geographies
• Educate users to take security seriously and handle customer data with utmost care

#5. Introducing Recoverable Backup Options as Protection 

Taking backups of Salesforce data is an inevitable part of data protection. Compromising data backup can be the ‘weakest link’ to ‌the cause of a data breach event. Further, it also ‌to expenses related to incident response, notification, legal fees, and reputation damage, if the business fails to keep backup copies to recover their Salesforce.

If you still do not have a backup plan to protect your Salesforce data, the shortcomings might be –

• Your backup budget is exceeding your annual tech expenditure
• What type of backup will be more appropriate
• Of course, what would be the ideal backup storage for Salesforce data 
• And, lastly, what would be the recovery plan

DataArchiva’s backup & recovery application for Salesforce is perfect to put an end to all your challenges.

Three Tenants to Foolproof the Plan For Salesforce Data Protection with DataArchiva 

As a tech-agonistic product, it serves Salesforce customers with an easy-to-work interface to keep backup copies of data, metadata & files of their data. The app is built on these three tenants of data protection to uplift the confidence of its users –

• Confidentiality: This backup application runs on an authorization-driven process, with zero platform exposure of the data, thereby ensuring 100% control & ownership.
• Integrity: The application provides ample scope to validate the parent-child records & hierarchies in each step while setting up the backup processes, ensuring complete recoverable backups to protect the Salesforce.
• Availability: ‌DataArchiva backup & recovery allows point-on-click recovery of the Salesforce data backups with no external dependency to access data, ensuring data backups are available 24/7.

Moreover, you can avail of cheaper cloud storage as a backup option when using DataArchiva Backup & Recovery in Salesforce. To understand the product features & how it works for Salesforce, get the DataArchiva backup & recovery datasheet for details.