With election systems increasingly relying on cloud technology, the need for secure and resilient platforms is greater than ever. However, while states are modernizing their infrastructure with FedRAMP Authorized SaaS solutions such as Salesforce, many agencies remain unaware of the critical responsibility they hold in protecting the data stored within these systems.
Even with the most advanced SaaS platforms, government agencies must manage data security—including maintaining backups and controlling access—independently. Without the right tools, expertise, and processes, these efforts can leave blind spots that compromise the confidentiality, availability, and integrity of election data.
Understanding the Shared Responsibility Model
While platforms like Salesforce provide a robust foundation, the responsibility for safeguarding voter data rests squarely with the agencies using the system. As Eoghan Casey, Field CTO at Own, explains:
“Under the Shared Responsibility Model, Salesforce manages the security of the platform, while the customer maintains the security of data stored on the platform. This means that government agencies (and all organizations for that matter) using Salesforce are responsible for managing data classification, access control, disaster recovery, data retention, threat monitoring, and more. Unfortunately, most agencies lack visibility into their Salesforce data security and risks, don’t know what ‘bad’ looks like in these environments, and haven’t tested their ability to recover rapidly. These blindspots leave gaps in security compliance and can result in exposure of sensitive information and disruption of mission-critical operations. Untested backups can create a risk if they don’t work as expected.”
How Own’s FedRAMP Authorized Solutions Can Help
Using SaaS solutions without adequate measures to protect voter information increases the risk of exposure and loss impacting election systems.
Over the past year, we have observed significant increases in Salesforce vulnerability and data loss, resulting in data leaks and service disruptions. The most common causes of such data loss and corruption incidents are human mistakes, such as inadvertent deletion and integration errors.
Given the challenges of protecting SaaS data, there is an urgent need for all states to be prepared for problems impacting data in Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
At Own, we have been instrumental in helping states recover from these incidents, including the restoration of lost voter registration data, minimizing downtime, and restoring critical services before they could impact election integrity.
Own’s FedRAMP Authorized solutions include capabilities to:
- Automatically back up SaaS data and metadata to a segregated environment
- Proactively detect and alert when data loss or corruption occurs before it becomes a bigger problem
- Precisely target and restore only the damaged data at the field level, leaving the bulk of your “still good” data untouched.
- Perform a comparative analysis between backups to verify data integrity when questions arise.
- Maintain good data security with data classification and the principle of least privilege.
Own Recover enables agencies to restore Salesforce data quickly and reliably, reducing downtime by 71% and increasing the efficiency of data recovery teams by 37%. Meanwhile, Own Secure reduces by 80% the time and resources required to keep Salesforce data secure and to produce reports for audit and compliance purposes.
Our onboarding process is fast and straightforward—depending on the product, setup can take as little as 30 minutes. Book a personalized demo to see how quickly you can secure your voter data and future-proof your election systems.
