It’s no surprise that Salesforce is the leading cloud-based software provider in the world. It currently delivers service to more than 150,000 businesses globally, employs over 56,000 employees, generated $21.25 billion during the 2021 fiscal year, and has captured 19.8% share of the CRM market, which is more than its four leading competitors combined.
The Salesforce environment has an array of tools to benefit its users, but those tools can only do so much. Certain precautions must be taken by companies to better protect themselves, one of which is data protection. Safeguarding Salesforce data is not Salesforces’ responsibility; that lies with the company. In all honesty, there’s a shared responsibility — Salesforce is responsible for protecting the infrastructure, application, and service availability; protecting your company’s Salesforce data must be done by you.
Why is protecting your Salesforce data so important? Let’s consider four areas:
- Ransomware Risk – Ransomware attacks are a major concern and becoming more sophisticated. They usually begin with a phishing email from an outsider. Training company employees on what to look for to avoid phishing scams or malware attacks is a necessity. Companies exposed to ransomware can face a number of risks, including data loss, financial loss and repetitional damage. In some cases, companies have even been forced to shut down completely due to lack of training.
- Insider Threats – Internal threats can also be an issue to any company and should be taken seriously. There are numerous ways internal actions by internal employees could produce serious threats to a company’s protected data —phishing and social engineering, data sharing outside the company, using unauthorized devices, and physical theft of a company’s device, to name a few.
- Human Error – A company’s employees are among the biggest threats to data security, so employees should be trained on best practices to prevent data loss. Humans are considered the weakest link in data security since they’re bound to make mistakes. It’s no surprise that accidental deletion is one of the leading causes of data loss in SaaS applications. Unfortunately, human error has been a major contributing factor behind many data breaches as well. In fact, 82% of data breaches involve the human element.
- Data Corruption – In today’s interconnected economy, more and more companies rely on third-party companies. It’s becoming increasingly common for companies to outsource large parts of their business to dedicated vendors who specialize in a specific function. While this can save on time and money, most data loss and data corruption result from third-party integrations and add-ons, so choosing the right third-parties to rely on is crucial for data protection.
Components of a Good Data Protection Strategy
Now that you know why protecting your Salesforce data is so vital, how do you know you’re applying best practices to ensure data is safe and secure? Consider the following elements every good protection strategy should include:
- Automated backup-to-backup and the entire platform, including your Sandbox, without any human intervention
- Fast recovery with granular search and full-fidelity restore options
- Assured compliance with unlimited storage and retention
- Full application content preservation to ensure relationships, metadata, files, and custom objects are never lost
- Hardened security controls that reduce risk with hardened security controls, air-gapped backups, and zero-trust user access
- Built-in sandbox to accelerate development and test and enable a number of development and testing workflows that will greatly enhance agility of development teams
The lifeblood of any organization is the data it captures and uses to accomplish its mission or purpose for existing. When an organization uses a platform like Salesforce, that data is particularly crucial and should be protected at all costs. To learn more on how to best protect your organization’s Salesforce data, view this infographic and contact Verinext for a consultation.