Salesforce Shield: Things to know

Several security methods are available to businesses seeking to safeguard their consumer data and maintain conformance. Salesforce Shield is one of the most alluring of these options. Salesforce came up with the idea for Salesforce Shield back in 2015 to safeguard the confidentiality of its users while also ensuring the safety of the application’s data. It allows clients to track and identify what is happening with sensitive information.

This article will assist you in delving further into the powerful controls available inside Salesforce Shield and the benefits it offers in contrast to the traditional Salesforce security controls.

Salesforce Shield is designed for businesses that demand higher data protection and compliance standards. It features a set of three security solutions that work together to help you establish additional layers of credibility, compliance, and administration directly into the most important applications of your company. 

As an added bonus, Salesforce Shield provides features that aren’t standard in the Salesforce platform. These are particularly important for customers who store sensitive information in Salesforce and/or operate in sectors subject to regulations.

Salesforce Shield implementation provides three potent capabilities to help you prepare your Salesforce org for compliance and regulatory checks.  Let’s explore each one in-depth, providing extra insight into how they enhance the platform’s regular controls.

Shield Platform Encryption

If you’re looking for a replacement for Classic Encryption, go no further than Shield Platform Encryption. When using Classic Encryption, you can only secure a subset of custom fields, but when using Platform Encryption, you can protect a wide range of both standard and customized fields. In addition to covering areas like search, processes, and clearances, it also considers all the applications for rendering and processing encrypted files in these areas.

Besides increasing the maximum encryption strength to 256 bits, Platform Encryption also offers a variety of field- and element-specific encryption algorithms, as well as the option to generate store, and retrieve private keys on demand, whether from inside or outside of the Salesforce environment.

Event Monitoring

The Salesforce Shield implementation includes Event Monitoring as the second key to unlocking valuable data for Shield customers. Over fifty different sorts of events, including logins, pageviews, API requests, and report runs, are monitored by Salesforce’s Event Monitoring system. It’s a feature that can be used through APIs and works by storing information about events in a file named EventLogFile.

The Salesforce platform makes it possible to examine, categorize, and save event logs using a web interface known as the Event Log File Browser. This makes the intimidating task of wading through many event recordings more manageable. The Event Monitoring Analytics application provides prebuilt panels to help you display the information more attractively. You may export your data for visualization in FairWarning, Splunk, New Relic, or any other tracking system you like.

For further in-depth research into your data-use patterns, Event Monitoring may be useful in several situations. It might aid in the early detection of use issues and the diagnosis of adoption issues among freshly installed Salesforce applications. Aside from assisting in the early detection and prevention of data theft and loss, it might also give in-depth insights into difficulties with your applications’ performance and reveal who is accessing crucial company data.

Field Audit Trail

If you have severe auditing standards for your Salesforce org, Field Audit Trail can help you be ready by keeping a close eye on a broad range of standard and customized objects. Using the Salesforce Metadata API, Audit Trail will let you set a retention policy for historical data that may last for up to ten years. Additionally, it allows for a greater maximum of fields to be monitored per entity (up to 60, as opposed to 20 without this functionality). The monitoring does not tally against your organization’s data storage limit.

Be aware that any data that has been archived in the past will not be encrypted until both the Field Audit Trail and the Platform Encryption features have been activated, so keep this in mind if you want to enable both of these features simultaneously.

Before moving forward with the Salesforce Shield implementation, there are a few factors that need to be taken into consideration.

Costs of Activation and Renewal

Since Salesforce Shield is an additional layer on top of your current Salesforce org, the price of activating Shield depends on how widely you’ve used Salesforce. The massive shift from a usage-based approach for Salesforce licenses may represent as much as a third of the entire price for many firms. If you use Salesforce more often, your annual spending may precipitate due to the proportional increase in Shield costs. Keeping an eye on your commercial license to engage and extend Shield each time as a Salesforce client is essential.

Efforts in Security and Encryption

Salesforce Shield complements the security paradigm you’ve established at all levels of your Salesforce org. Encryption, in particular, should not be implemented until the data protection regulations at the organizational and field levels have been established and activated.

While the implementation of Shield Platform Encryption may help prevent unauthorized parties from viewing sensitive data, it cannot make up for insufficient security measures that enable sensitive information to be accessed by authorized parties in the first place. Before enabling Salesforce Shield, you should thoroughly assess your security model by completing the Salesforce Baseline Standard Health Check.

Establishing a data security strategy allows a company to identify the sensitive information it stores, the risks it faces, and the counter measures it should take. Customers may have faith in their Salesforce Orgs with the help of Salesforce Shield, which can be used for various purposes, including regulatory compliance, securing intellectual information, and protecting the organization itself.

If you’re looking for Salesforce Shield assistance or setup, go no further than Manras.  As a trusted Salesforce partner, our consulting team is available to assist you with setting up and customizing Salesforce Shield to meet your business’s requirements. If you have any queries, don’t hesitate to contact us at team@manras.com.