If you’re a Salesforce systems or Information Security leader looking to optimize your security for high-scale business efficiency, we’ve got you covered. With the use of Salesforce Shield, your organization can understand, protect, and monitor your data to reduce IT costs by 25%.
We’re delving into the key factors you should consider when investing in Salesforce Shield, and also highlighting the industries that can benefit most from its implementation. We’re enabling leaders to make informed decisions about Salesforce Shield’s suitability for their organization when it comes to comprehensive security for critical data.
Learn how you can protect sensitive information at scale with Salesforce Shields enhanced data protection, event monitoring and compliance capabilities. Let’s dive into some key components and specific ways they can benefit your team.
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What is Salesforce Shield?
Salesforce Shield is a suite of premium security tools provided by Salesforce, designed to enhance data protection, compliance, and transparency by offering features like platform encryption, event monitoring, and field audit trail.
It’s an essential tool for any organization that requires additional security and compliance measures, so it comes as no shock that companies across healthcare, financial, government, and retail and e-commerce industries heavily utilize it.
Ensuring the integrity and protection of your data becomes more important by the day. Salesforce Shield provides the necessary capabilities for organizations to establish procedures that meet both internal and external regulatory requirements. This powerful package includes four indispensable components, all designed with your safety and compliance in mind:
1. Event Monitoring
By implementing user activity monitoring, you can establish transaction security policies that track user activities across various channels, including browsers, the Salesforce mobile app, and the Salesforce APIs. This proactive approach enables real-time identification and prevention of unauthorized or suspicious behavior, allowing your team to swiftly detect and mitigate potential threats.
2. Platform Encryption
With Salesforce Shield platform encryption, you have the accessibility to enhance the security of highly sensitive data by encrypting it at rest within all Salesforce applications. This provides an additional layer of protection for personally identifiable information, as well as sensitive, confidential and proprietary data. By encrypting data at rest, you can effectively meet both internal and external data compliance regulations while ensuring the continued functionality of important application features such as search, workflow and validation rules.
3. Field Audit Trail Enhanced
Salesforce Shield’s Field Audit Trail component enhances the standard Salesforce Audit Trail by providing additional capabilities. While the standard Salesforce Audit Trail allows you to track changes to metadata (like changes to the layout, the creation of new fields, etc.), Field Audit Trail goes a step further by enabling you to track data changes at the field level in records.
With Field Audit Trail, you can retain historical data up to 10 years, and track changes on up to 60 fields per object– whereas without Shield, you can only track 20 fields per object. This means you can see the full history of a particular record, including when a field was changed, who changed it, and what the old and new values are. This enhances your ability to meet compliance policies, conduct investigations, and maintain a more complete history of your Salesforce data.
4. Data Archive
Another feature within Shield is Einstein Data Detect, which automatically scans your Salesforce database, and identifies PII and other sensitive data you may not even know is there. The scan results will shed light on data that needs reviewing to ensure your org is properly protecting it.
When Systems Leaders Should Consider Salesforce Shield
Many businesses have or are beginning to adopt a more sophisticated data governance program to protect themselves from financial risks related to data leakage. As your organization builds out this program, it’s important to ensure your admins aren’t making changes lightly– especially when managing sensitive data in a highly regulated industry. Poorly managed Salesforce changes could lead to massive breaks, wasted time, loss in revenue, and huge non-compliance fees. No one wants to deal with the repercussions… so, when should you consider Salesforce Shield? Here are 5 sure-fire signs:
1. Regulatory Compliance
The acronyms GDPR, HIPAA, or PCI probably ring a bell – especially for those working in industries like healthcare, finance, and government. These industries have stringent regulations that require long-term data retention and auditing. If your organization falls under such regulations, implementing Salesforce Shield can help to avoid non-compliance consequences your company may face including fines, penalties, damaged reputation, business closure, and even prison time.
2. Data Security
Data privacy is top of mind for systems leaders as their businesses gather and document more consumer data everyday. In 2022, the average cost of a fine related to issues with data privacy was $4.35 million. If your organization deals with sensitive information like personal data, intellectual property, or financial data, Salesforce Shield’s platform encryption can help protect that data at rest.
3. Enhanced Transparency
If there’s a need for increased visibility into how your Salesforce data is being accessed and used, Salesforce Shield’s event monitoring can provide those insights. Not to mention, Salesforce Shield brings your Compliance & Security Team and Salesforce admins together, getting everyone on the same page when it comes to critical compliance measures and meeting the need for advanced security controls.
4. Detailed Audit Trails
Data governance is a way to not only manage the security of data, but also its usability and integrity in your system. By utilizing audit trail, you can monitor and create standards and policies throughout your organization around data usage. While standard Salesforce provides field history tracking for up to 18 months and for limited fields, Field Audit Trail, which comes with Shield, increases this capacity, allowing you to track changes up to 10 years on as many as 60 fields per object.
5. Enterprise Scale
As an organization scales and their Salesforce implementations grow more complex, the value of Salesforce Shield also increases due to its enhanced security and auditing capabilities.
Ultimately, the decision to adopt Salesforce Shield should be based on the specific needs and context of the organization. So, it’s important to conduct a thorough risk assessment and understand your compliance obligations before making a decision.
Benefits of Salesforce Shield
Salesforce Shield boosts organizational resilience by providing a multitude of benefits against potential threats including the following:
1. Protection Against Security Threats
Salesforce Shield provides robust protection against data breaches and cyber attacks. With features like encryption, access controls, and event monitoring, Shield helps safeguard sensitive data from unauthorized access and ensures the integrity of critical information.
2. Improved Compliance and Regulatory Adherence
Enhancing compliance and regulatory adherence, Salesforce Shield offers functionalities such as data encryption, field audit trail, and platform encryption. These features enable organizations to meet industry-specific regulations, instilling trust among customers and stakeholders.
3. Enhanced Data Visibility and Control
With a greater amount of data visibility and control using Salesforce Shield, businesses have the ability to manage and monitor data access, modifications, and usage effectively.
4. Advanced Threat Detection and Response Capabilities
Shield empowers advanced threat detection and response capabilities with its transaction security and event monitoring features. It enables proactive identification of suspicious activities and triggers automated responses to mitigate potential threats promptly.
Conclusion: Easily Identify and Monitor Your Sensitive Data With the Right Tool Kit
By leveraging Salesforce Shield, Systems, Ops and InfoSec leaders can significantly strengthen the security posture of their Salesforce applications, instill trust among stakeholders, and ensure the privacy and integrity of critical data.
And if you really want to take your security to the next level, we recommend coupling Shield with Sonar’s Data Dictionary feature. With Data Dictionary, you can organize, define and classify your data, including documenting personally identifiable information (PII). Plus, what was once was a manual effort is now automated through Sonar.
If you’re ready to simplify documentation, mitigate risk and safeguard intellectual property, try Sonar free today.