Protect your Data in Salesforce | All You Need to Know

Salesforce is a powerful cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) system that helps you manage your customers, leads, accounts, and more. It can also be a significant security risk if not properly configured. In this post, I'll share some best practices for keeping Salesforce secure and protecting your data from unauthorized access and breaches.

Set Limited Permissions

Salesforce's permission model is robust, allowing you to set permissions at the object level, field level, user level, and role level. These permissions can be inherited down the hierarchy. This allows you to control access to your data in Salesforce in a variety of ways.

Enable Multi-Factor Authentication

Multi-Factor Authentication is one of the most effective ways to protect your data. Anyone who wants to log into their Salesforce account must provide more than a username and password. You also need access to a second piece of information that belongs only to you. This means that no one else can break into your system.

Don't forget to check out: Secure Coding Practices for Salesforce Developers

Enabling MFA prompts for additional ID formats after entering credentials. There are many options available. An SMS text message with a code is sent to your mobile phone. Apps such as Authy and Google Authenticator. Or even something as simple as an automated phone call from Zendesk Support asking if you're really trying to log in! (e.g., an email address associated with a specific individual). The extra steps required for multi-factor authentication immediately stop these types of attacks.

Identifying Vulnerabilities and Misconfigurations

After identifying security vulnerabilities, it is important to understand how to identify misconfigurations. Misconfigurations are errors in the Salesforce platform that can lead to unauthorized access or tampering with data and systems.

Inspect Suspicious Code Safely

The best way to mitigate these risks is to develop a policy for handling questionable code and follow that policy. A key step is to use automated tools that can inspect your code. These tools are usually available for free or at a low cost and can help you find malicious code in your organization's Salesforce. Also, if you want to make sure everything looks fine, check the file manually.

Check out another amazing blog by Kapil here: All You Need to Know About Permission Sets

Perform Regular Backups

Backups are a necessary part of data security. You should perform regular backups at least once a week. Many organizations run a nightly full backup and weekly backup of their Salesforce org to an offsite location. If you've been using Salesforce for five years or more, your org has a lot of customizations and metadata that can become difficult to maintain over time.

In fact, some companies spend thousands of dollars a month to maintain customizations that work well with new changes in the platform and third-party applications they use with Salesforce (such as Service Cloud).