The State of Data Protection in Salesforce is Changing! Are You Aligned with its Future?

In today’s hyper-connected world, companies that leverage Salesforce to run their businesses generate massive amounts of data, ranging from confidential business, financial, & customer data to extremely critical information. In addition to Salesforce, companies also make use of various other cloud solutions, giving rise to a multi-cloud environment where more & more business-critical data is stored. But this data is vulnerable to all kinds of data loss events like cyberattacks, human errors, system failures, malicious employees, & so on.

This makes data protection in Salesforce a crucial and much-needed strategy, in 2022, so that the normal, day-to-day business operations can run smoothly. It’s no surprise that nine out of 10 cybersecurity professionals have concerns about cloud security. For them, their biggest challenges are protecting against data loss and leakage (67%), threats to data privacy (61%), & breaches of confidentiality (53%). 

“In 2022, organizations must continue to invest in compliance and data sovereignty. More companies must level up with the requirements of GDPR, which especially expects organizations to integrate the latest encryption technologies to safeguard consumers’ data and to minimize the hazards associated with data transfers,” nn                                                                                                                                                              Dell Technologies

In this article, we will outline the key trends that will shape data privacy & data protection for the Salesforce platform in 2022. So, let’s take a look at the expected trends & then see how businesses can rise above them for more business growth.

Rise of New Data Regulations & Policies

The data privacy regulatory environment in Salesforce is rigorous & it’s expected to become even more perilous in 2022. This year marks the 4th anniversary of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), since the introduction of which, more than 100 countries have either enacted or proposed a data protection law & even then new regulations are steadily emerging. As the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), Virginia Consumer Data Privacy Act (VCDPA), & the Colorado Privacy Act (ColoPA) come into effect in 2023, companies should also be on the lookout for new privacy laws from the United Kingdom, Australia, India, China, & Canada.

Not only this, even GDPR is coming up with major updates such as the release of new Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs), that concentrate on the transfer of personal data from the EU to third countries, such as the United States. In fact, it is projected that 65% of the world’s population will have its personal information covered under a privacy regulation by 2023, up from just 10% today. Though these laws help secure the personal information of users, they make compliance more complex for Salesforce enterprises that stand to incur potentially huge penalties in case they fail to comply with the regulations.

Threats of Ransomware & Cyberattacks

According to a recent study by the UK National Cyber Security Centre, there were three times as many ransomware attacks in the first quarter of 2021 as there were in the whole of 2020. Moreover, another research by PwC suggests that 61% of technology executives expect these ransomware attacks to increase in 2022. To add fuel to this fire, system vulnerabilities, like Log4j, & the ongoing global pandemic have been particularly helpful to cybercriminals, the prime example of this being the SolarWinds hack last year.  n

“My main prediction is that attacks will continue to happen, businesses will be breached, they will be held to ransom (and some will pay) and unfortunately, some will fail because of it. Lessons will be learned (but necessarily addressed) and the battle between the hackers and security specialists will continue.”nn                                                                                                                                                                       Steve Stobo

Trends like work from anywhere & bring your own device, the rapid digitization of society, & the increasingly online nature of business mean increased opportunities for phishers, hackers, scammers, and extortionists. As we head into 2022, it’s essential for businesses, using Salesforce, to be aware of the ever-growing threat of cyberattacks & what steps need to be taken to mitigate the risk.

Remote Working is Here to Stay

If there’s one thing businesses all over the world were collectively wrong about, then it was predicting that employees would return to the offices, as normal, in 2021. And boy were they wrong! Instead, remote working continued, forcing Salesforce-using companies to develop long-term strategies that catered to remotely-working employees in order to maintain efficiency, sustainability, flexibility, & employee retention. But with these work-from-anywhere strategies came increased threats to the critical data in Salesforce.

In 2022, & maybe even beyond, enterprises will be forced to adapt to the remote working culture & devise their business as well as data protection strategies accordingly so as to properly accommodate the increased threats of data loss, cyberattacks, & system failures. Not only the Salesforce cloud platform, but enterprises also need to think about monitoring each employee that accesses crucial data, while still providing him proper accessibility.

Introducing Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Data Protection

Probably the biggest trend in the field of data protection in Salesforce is the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI). As per the predictions, in 2022, machine learning, powered by AI technology, will be adopted at faster rates than ever before to get ahead of needle-in-a-haystack issues that no amount of manual intervention would uncover. Using AI, as a data protection strategy, is beneficial as it can analyze data faster, automate common IT operation tasks, detect problems as soon as they occur, & also improve security monitoring.

In the context of the data protection space in Salesforce, AI technology can be easily leveraged to recognize unusual patterns in storage or data backup activity that could point to operational issues or, more concerningly, in-progress cyberattacks.

Data Backups are Irreplaceable

No matter how many data protection strategies are introduced to the Salesforce ecosystem, creating secure data backups remains the #1 data protection strategy, even in 2022. Backing up the data in Salesforce is the best practice when it comes to creating multiple copies of business data & retaining them until they need to be restored, in case of a data loss event. With an end-to-end data backup strategy in place, when faced with a data breach event, enterprises can quickly bounce back & resume business operations.

Keeping the above-mentioned trends in mind & taking action on data protection regulations will ensure that businesses are not punished or penalized. Businesses should prepare themselves and set up plans to assess the applicability of data privacy laws & regulations, along with a schedule for company adjustments for seamless compliance. And the best way to protect data in Salesforce is to securely back it up into secure secondary storage.

If you need any help with data backup & recovery in Salesforce, DataArchiva Backup is at your service. With its robust data backup & reliable recovery capabilities, the application is well-equipped to fulfill all your data protection needs in Salesforce. In order to understand the application better, please get in touch with our experts or check out this comprehensive datasheet.

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