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6 Essential DevSecOps Tools for Salesforce in 2022

Josh Rank
January 19, 2022

DevOps is a journey, not a light switch. There will always be ways to refine your approach, get the most from your procedures, and see better returns. One of the best things you can do is to enable your team with powerful tools to help them maximize their efforts.

Combine that with a new approach and you’re setting yourself up for a productive year. Combining the efforts of your development and operations team streamlines your processes, but that isn’t enough anymore.

Security considerations need to be embedded within every step of your DevOps pipeline to give you the best chance at remaining secure.

Data security is going to be a major concern over the course of the new year. This is why adjusting your Salesforce development viewpoint to a DevSecOps mindset is so essential. There are many potential sources of data loss, corruption, or any other form of breach that have a negative impact on your business, team members, and customers.

The best way to solidify your data security measures is to produce the most secure applications and updates possible. Automation and intentional practices will assist with this.

We thought we’d outline some of the tools that will be necessary throughout the next year to not only maintain proper levels of security but to also optimize the returns from your development efforts.

Here are 6 tools every Salesforce DevSecOps pipeline needs in 2022:

Static Code Analysis
Data Backup & Recovery
Continuous Integration
Continuous Deployment/Delivery
Version Control
Data Loader

1. Static Code Analysis

Every aspect of a development project is going to have an impact on the overall security and stability of the eventual product. This often leads people to focus on securing entry points through two factor authentication and complicated passwords. And while those are great practices, many are surprised to learn that the quality of their code plays a role in data security as well.

Static code analysis provides real-time insight into code health, so nothing slips between the cracks to create a data security vulnerability later in the Salesforce DevSecOps pipeline.

Bugs and errors in the code that make it through production can impact the stability of your product. Cybercriminals can exploit this to gain access to systems through back doors. Overall failures can also threaten your data.

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2. Data Backup & Recovery

A best practice for 2022 might sound familiar because it is an ever-present recommendation: back up your system data. We can’t prepare for every possible threat to your system data. They are always changing and evolving. Our mitigation techniques also evolve but they’ll never be able to account for factors like user error and natural disasters.

A Salesforce data backup and recovery tool is an essential part of a complete Salesforce DevSecOps strategy.

You never truly know what’s going to happen. This is why people buy insurance for their cars and homes. Think of data backup and recovery as an insurance policy on your Salesforce data and metadata. You don’t want to be caught in an accident without insurance, and you don’t want to be caught in a data loss event without a recent backup.

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3. Continuous Integration

Compiling the efforts of a multiple developer team can be a lengthy process. Testing the lines of code to make sure they don’t negatively interact with each other is a painstaking task. Integrating all of these aspects of the project into a singular location takes a lot of time and attention.

Continuous integration automates the process of compiling the efforts of your team into a single project, saving time and money.

Manual processes are susceptible to human error, particularly when they are lengthy and repetitive. Continuous integration takes this task off the hands of your team members to free them up to address more pressing concerns. The reduction in errors and increase in productivity make this an essential tool for Salesforce DevSecOps.

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4. Continuous Deployment/Delivery

The second half of integrating the efforts of your team into a singular location is to move the project to the deployment stage.

Continuous delivery is an automated process to move all types of changes such as features, configurations, and bug fixes into production after receiving the appropriate approvals. Continuous deployment takes this one step further by removing the approval stage to automate the entire process and get the product to production as quickly as possible.

These tools enable Salesforce DevSecOps teams to build, test, and release with increased frequency and speed.

The needs of your customers—and your data security department—are going to evolve quickly in 2022. These tools expedite operations so you can introduce updates to directly contribute to these efforts.

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5. Version Control

Multi developer teams are a great way to expedite your Salesforce DevSecOps projects. More hands on a project will be able to push it through faster. However, multiple team members working on a singular update or application will also introduce a series of challenges.

Version control is a source code management tool that allows multi developer teams to manage software revisions or updates over time.

Branching strategies allow your team to revert to older versions to avoid overwrites and errors. Version control works to keep all changes to the main code repository in sync with each other. We’ve discussed the importance of quality code. Version control is an essential tool to keep your Salesforce DevSecOps projects on the right path to set up later stages for success.

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6. Data Loader

Transferring records and data between Salesforce environments is often necessary to provide essential information. This can sometimes include thousands of pieces of data. Manually entering this information simply isn’t an option for companies that don’t want to spend massive amounts of time setting up an environment.

A Salesforce data loader makes importing and exporting massive amounts of data much easier and more reliable.

This automated DevSecOps tool can be used to migrate customer information between Salesforce environments, export records to backup repositories, upload massive amounts of new data, and more.

Flexibility and data security are going to be essential aspects of your DevSecOps efforts in 2022. Tools like static code analysis, CI/CD, and others will help you work toward these goals and keep your information and system data secure.

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