5 Best Practices for Extended Salesforce Data Protection

In Salesforce, having a backup is just as crucial as in other systems, given that a CRM is a dynamic environment where numerous users continuously add or modify records every minute of every day. Therefore, implementing a strong Salesforce backup strategy is vital.

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

Here are some warning signs that you might not be following the best practices to protect your Salesforce data:

– Your organization lacks the right systems to manage sensitive information securely.

– You rely too much on Salesforce’s basic security features.

– You’re expanding to new regions without understanding local data protection laws.

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

Salesforce has top-notch security for its system, including its infrastructure, platform, and apps. However, customers must also follow certain basic practices to keep their data safe and well-managed, ensuring they maintain full control.

This is known as the ‘Shared Responsibility Model.’ It means Salesforce takes care of the security of the platform itself, while customers are responsible for protecting and managing their data. By doing this, both Salesforce and its customers work together to create a reliable and successful system.

As data responsibilities vary across organizations, we asked our data experts what could be the best practices for Salesforce data protection that will validate the ‘trust’ factor and defend against weakness 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 Tips for Maintaining a Strong Data Culture and Enhancing Salesforce Data Security:

This perspective looks at what customers are responsible for and identifies important factors that influence Salesforce data practices to boost business stability. Here are some practical steps to enhance your Salesforce data management and keep customer information safe.

1. Using the Least Privilege Approach

Around 23% of cloud security issues come from setup errors. To improve Salesforce efficiency and protect data, set user permissions carefully.

The “Least Privilege” approach means giving users only the access they need. This involves preparing user roles in advance so they only have the necessary permissions, which helps prevent unauthorized access and security breaches.

2. Reducing Exposure with Data Minimization

For businesses aiming to strengthen data protection in Salesforce, minimizing data exposure is key. If you’re storing data older than 5 years, ensure it is:

Targeted: Only what is needed to meet specific goals.

Relevant: Directly related to those goals.

Store only essential data for compliance, internal processes, or audits.

3. Minimizing External Dependencies for Data Access

Organizations often face delays in handling data breaches due to reliance on external services for Salesforce data backups. This can extend recovery times and increase downtime costs. By reducing reliance on these external sources, you can gain better control over data storage and achieve quicker response times.

4. Enhancing Security Permissions with Flexible 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. Implementing Recoverable Backup Options

Backing up Salesforce data is crucial for data protection. Inadequate backups can lead to data breaches and incur high costs for incident response, legal fees, and reputational damage.

If you lack a backup plan, consider:

– Your backup budget vs. tech expenses

– The most suitable backup type

– Ideal backup storage for Salesforce data

– A solid recovery plan

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

Three Essentials for Ensuring Robust 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.