The sensitive information you hold in Salesforce is vital to the growth of your company. When data is procured, your teams can use it to build and maintain valuable company relationships, manage interactions and turn leads into valued customers. These crucial components help you expand the reach of your business and better serve your customers.
But how can you protect this vast amount of sensitive information and ensure the right people have the right level of access? Implementing routine practices can provide more than just peace of mind. Here’s how you can use Salesforce security best practices to keep your most critical data secure.
1. Set Restrictive Permissions
One of the most important ways to protect your data is to take measures that help prevent an internal attack. If a cybersecurity incident occurs, restricting administrative access helps ensure adversaries are less likely to access admin accounts with far-reaching privileges.
Once intentional permissions are set, be sure to review and revalidate them over time. From new accounts to those no longer in use, routine housekeeping can help ensure your information remains secure.
We know this can be a challenge to do manually and Admins are often looking for solutions to save time. Third-party tools like Own Secure offer features that let you easily search your Salesforce data across objects, records, and user lenses to understand precisely why particular Salesforce users have read, edit, delete, or export permissions.
2. Activate Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
Multi-factor authentication adds extra protection to your Salesforce data, and is now a requirement of all organizations that use Salesforce. As the infiltration techniques used by adversaries become more advanced, a simple password may not be enough to protect against unauthorized usage. MFA requires the user to confirm their identity in two or more ways upon logging in.
This extra layer of security can be achieved in a few ways, such as:
- Security keys: Security keys are small devices that can be used in place of a password. This handheld hardware is easy to carry with you and links via port or wireless technology for versatile connectivity.
- Authenticator apps: These apps create unique, temporary login codes for a more secure login process.
- Built-in authenticators: From facial recognition to fingerprint readers, enabling the basic MFA verification processes on your desktop, laptop or mobile device can boost security.
3. Create a Plan for Identifying Vulnerabilities and Misconfigurations
Understanding what data you have in Salesforce and identifying misconfigurations are foundational steps to strengthening your org’s security posture, as well as reducing risk. It’s important to have a standardized plan across your organization for finding Salesforce security vulnerabilities. We suggest assigning someone to this task to ensure Salesforce security checks are run at regular intervals.
Salesforce offers the Health check tool, which can be a good starting point for smaller organizations. However, most companies need much more robust capabilities that are customized to their company’s security policy and can analyze important implementation details like custom code and user access configuration.
With Own Secure for example, you can easily identify and fix misconfigurations, incorrect permissions, and data exposures in your Salesforce environment with ease. Secure also allows you to proactively automate the remediation of these misconfigurations with detailed action plans and real-time alerts.
4. Utilize Salesforce Security Health Check
If you are a smaller organization with a manageable amount of data, Salesforce has a native way to quickly identify easy Salesforce security wins. Within Salesforce's default tools, the Security Health Check provides Salesforce administrators with a thorough way to assess and better their organization's security setups. This tool identifies and recommends solutions for security weaknesses. It’s a great preliminary way to close small security holes, so use this free default part of Salesforce to your advantage. If your security issues go beyond what this tool provides, that’s when you should start thinking of third-party options.
5. Safely Inspect Suspicious Code
From creating precise development and testing environments to anonymizing sensitive data, populating a Salesforce sandbox with an intuitive seeding solution can help make verifying untested or untrustworthy code safer and simpler. This method creates an isolated environment that mirrors production environments, which helps prevent potentially malicious code before it infiltrates your network. With the code isolated to the test environment, you can experiment with different variables, test system changes before they go live and remove minor threats before they become significant issues.
6. Perform Regular Backups
Even with all these protections in place, it might not be possible to prevent every single threat that compromises your data. This is where strengthening the resiliency of your CRM platform becomes essential in keeping your business running like clockwork. Performing regular backups can protect critical data and metadata and make recovery quick and hassle-free. Here is a handy checklist of what a good backup and recovery solution should include.
Additional Tools for Salesforce Security
When dealing with large amounts of data, sometimes following best practices isn’t enough. We have created a SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) product to identify security risks, protect your organization, and remain privacy compliant.
Own Secure pinpoints misconfigurations, incorrect permissions, and data exposures wherever they may be in Salesforce. We also understand that classifying what parts of your dataset have sensitive information is important. So, our tool can isolate exactly where sensitive information exists in Salesforce and apply classification categories, all without leaving the Salesforce platform.
Want to know more?
- Ebook - Salesforce Security Risk Assessment Checklist
- Our checklist can help you assess security holes on your own.
- Webinar - Top 5 Salesforce Security Gaps
- Curious about the most common security issues? Watch our webinar to ensure your organization isn’t falling into these Salesforce security traps.
To do some more digging on your own, check out our library of data security articles and resources that can point you in the right direction. If you’re tired of looking for security holes, let us help with a free Salesforce Security Risk Assessment to review your security posture within Salesforce.
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