4 Things you Can do to Secure Your Salesforce Development Process

The success and failure of a business rely hugely on data. When in the right hands, it can spike up your sales, improve client relationships, and help you with lead conversion. But in the wrong hands, it can bring financial losses, goodwill loss, and immense security threats. 

Thus, managing this information securely and to your best potential is uncalled for. Businesses can invest in Salesforce development and ensure to streamline their business processes, automate them, and secure them. 

While Salesforce is one of the best CRM SaaS providers present today with multiple security features, there still may remain vulnerabilities in your system. 

Reasons? – Not performing regular security audits, unauthorized access, using outdated software, poor salesforce development services, etc. 

To ensure such is not the case during your salesforce development and implementation process, you need to implement certain security practices. Here’s a list of such security implementations. 

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How to Make your Salesforce Development Project More Secure? 

1. Salesforce security health check 

One of the quickest options for security checks is through Salesforce security health check. This CRM feature assesses your organization’s security health based on Salesforce’s security baseline standard. It also allows business units to create their own custom security standards and check if their business still lives up to these. 

After the security check is done, your organization receives a grade befit to their earned score. 

• 90% and above means “Excellent”. 
• Scores of 80% to 89% show “Very Good”.
• 70% to 79% indicate “Good”. 
• Scores of 55% to 69% mean “Poor”
• 54% and below indicated “Very Poor”. 

Based on these scores and grades, Salesforce also recommends remedies for businesses. For instance, remediating high risks, medium risks, lower risks, periodic health checks, etc. 

While it doesn’t give a complete analysis of your organization’s security health, it is still a great tool that business units can use for detecting many security vulnerabilities. To execute such a health checkup of your Salesforce applications, navigate to ‘Setup’, then ‘Security’, and click on the ‘Health Check’ option.  

2. Audit third-party access 

Most organizations use third-party applications to meet their various business requirements like social sharing, email messaging, etc. These third-party systems can be LinkedIn, Dropbox, Mailchimp, or any other. 

If your organization uses such third-party apps, it becomes necessary to link them to your existing business setup for seamlessness. In the course of action, you also have to provide them with a certain level of permissions so they can exchange or access data from Salesforce. 

Since you allow permissions to these apps, it becomes necessary to perform their regular audits. A third-party app you use today may not remain as useful in the future and you would stop using it eventually. 

At the time, you would need to withdraw all the permissions or terminate the access for these apps. But, it is quite possible for businesses to forget to withdraw these permissions which might put your entire system at risk. 

So first of all, you need to create and maintain an inventory of your existing system. Make sure you perform regular audits for third-party access and ensure only authorized access is provided to them. 

3. Review access and authorization to external users 

When you are working with Salesforce CRM, you would have to provide authorization and access to multiple internal and external users. While providing authorization to internal users is crucial to carrying out necessary business operations, providing access to external users might not be as essential. 

However, a business will have vendors, trusted partners, community contributors, etc. who need access to the Salesforce services. So, businesses have to be extra cautious while providing access and authorization to these external users as they can have access to sensitive information or manipulate your data. 

To prevent these situations, Salesforce service providers always recommend relying on the “Principle of least privilege”. It means you should provide access and authorization to a minimum number of users with a minimum number of privileges. 

This practice can help you in more ways than one. You get to limit the number of audiences who can access your data and you also restrict them to access sensitive data or manipulate them. If you feel there’s a need to provide additional privileges, you can always grant them in the future. 

Besides the authentication and authorization procedures followed in the beginning, a business unit should also review these access controls regularly. It will make sure there is no unauthorized access or security breach. 

Further, let’s look at some of these tips – 

• Guest users shouldn’t have the privilege to view all users. 
• Any guest users shouldn’t own your organization records. 
• You should never provide access to ‘All users’ for sensitive information. These are also not shared with external or guest users. 
• You shouldn’t add guest users to any public groups. 

4. Enable multi-factor authentication 

With the growing number of cyber threats and invaders, protecting your Salesforce-powered system using a password isn’t sufficient. You need more to protect these invaders from barging in. multi-factor authentication is a way to achieve that. 

It adds extra layers of security to your Salesforce data as users will need to verify their authorized access in more than one step. Here are a few ways you can achieve this – 

• Authenticator apps can be used to create unique login credentials, ensuring improved security. 
• Use of security keys in place of passwords. It’s a handheld device that connects via a wireless method or port. 
• Built-in authenticators like fingerprint sensors, facial recognition systems, etc. for secure login. 

These are some of the security measures you need to take to protect your Salesforce development process from potential security breaches. Users can also avail of Salesforce development services and adopt best security practices to protect their systems from any unprecedented security attacks.