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If You Aren’t Using Salesforce Monitoring Tools, Your Data Is at Risk

Josh Rank
September 6, 2023

Visibility into your DevOps pipeline helps prevent and address data security risks. Salesforce monitoring tools provide the support you need to accomplish this.

Why It Matters: Hidden breaches, unseen vulnerabilities, and human error can all be flagged by Salesforce monitoring tools, saving your organization a lot of time and money.

The average cost of a data breach in 2023 is $4.45 million.
On average, it takes 280 days to detect and contain a data breach.
Internal threats to data integrity are just as dangerous as external threats.

Here are 8 ways Salesforce monitoring tools protect your system data:

Verify Approved Access
Track User Activity
Data Loss Prevention
Real-Time Alerts
Compliance Monitoring
Dashboards and Reporting
Integration With DevSecOps Pipeline
Automated Coverage

1. Verify Approved Access

Data breaches aren’t always immediately apparent. A hacker who gains access to your Salesforce environment has free reign over your data so it’s in their best interest to hide their movements. And the longer a hacker has access to your system, the more damage they are liable to cause.

Salesforce monitoring tools can track access to data, features, and applications. Continuous oversight helps find unusual behavior that needs to be addressed as quickly as possible.

The goal is to identify and flag unauthorized or out-of-the-ordinary access to your Salesforce environment. Unexpected login attempts, curious behavior, or unordinary access patterns can point to an existing data breach. It’s up to the organization’s InfoSec team to find and fix these issues, and this is made much easier with the help of a monitoring tool.

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2. Track User Activity

It’s also a good idea to track the actions of those working within your Salesforce environment. Audit trails can be used to prove compliance with data security regulations, but they can also be used to trace poor performance back to the source. Insecure actions have the potential to lead to compromised data. And when it comes time to figure out how these corruptions occurred, it’s very useful to have access to a history of user activity.

Maintaining a log of the actions of different users through Salesforce monitoring tools alerts InfoSec teams to behavior that could negatively impact data security.

Unauthorized access to your system by hackers is a major consideration, but there can also be problems when team members are able to access parts of your environment they don’t need to perform their duties. Even those with innocent intentions have the potential to negatively impact the quality of your data through simple errors. Audit trails are essential for maintaining proper oversight of your Salesforce environment.

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3. Data Loss Prevention

Salesforce is likely your largest container of data. Customer information, team member information, business data—all of it is stored within your Salesforce environment. And while this makes it a very effective CRM, it can also make it a liability. Failing to properly protect this data can lead to costly losses and even compliance failures.

Monitoring tools can be used to identify patterns that indicate sensitive data is being accessed, shared, or transferred in violation of internal data protection policies.

Flagging these negative scenarios early helps teams prevent the leak of sensitive data. Those in regulated industries like healthcare, insurance, and finance need to utilize every type of protection they can. However, organizations in every industry should use automated monitoring tools to find these vulnerabilities early and protect their Salesforce data.

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4. Real-Time Alerts

Data protection requires immediacy. This isn’t something you can sit on for a while and eventually get to when you have some spare time. Any delay could mean the difference between preventing data loss and experiencing a costly outage. Data security threats are occurring around the clock to exploit vulnerabilities. You need to be ready to act at any time.

Real-time alerts and notifications from Salesforce monitoring tools can be set to trigger when predefined conditions occur.

Changes to sensitive data, login attempts from unusual locations, unapproved data exports—these types of occurrences can be monitored. Immediate alerts when scenarios like this occur give Salesforce teams the best chance at mitigating damage to their data.

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5. Compliance Monitoring

Regulated industries face a series of specific data security requirements. These industry-specific standards are up to organizations themselves to police, up to a certain point. Regulatory audits occur to verify proper security practices are in place to adhere to the stipulated requirements. The GDPR, HIPAA, SOX, and more will enforce fines and penalties to anyone out of compliance.

Monitoring tools like a policy scanner can be used to verify proper data handling practices. Alerts are sent to administrators when an error is found, enabling the organization to fix it and maintain compliance.

Automated scans of your Salesforce environment provide a level of coverage that can’t be matched with manual processes. Any errors are flagged so they can be quickly rectified.

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6. Dashboards and Reporting

Planning and adjusting your strategy are huge aspects of maintaining a successful Salesforce data security strategy over time. Cybercriminals are always looking for new ways to find and exploit vulnerabilities—your response must be equally diligent. And the most effective way to do this is to analyze metrics for clues on how to make the correct adjustments.

Dashboards and reports from tools like static code analysis and other monitoring tools offer an overview of successes and help you identify areas for improvement.

Reports and metrics for system health, user activity, and security risks should all be analyzed over time to spot trends. These insights can then be used to introduce strategic updates and trainings.

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7. Integration With DevSecOps Pipeline

Imbuing your applications and updates with security takes a comprehensive approach. This can only be accomplished when data security is made a priority from the very first stages of the application development lifecycle. This means everybody who touches a piece of code, integrates changes into a master repository, scans for errors, or pushes deployments needs to do so with an eye toward proper functionality and security.

Integrating Salesforce monitoring tools within a larger DevSecOps framework contributes to the total coverage necessary for reliably secure applications.

Tools such as CI/CD, policy management, and static code analysis all work together to strengthen data security from a variety of angles. The result is a stronger Salesforce environment and error-free updates.

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8. Automated Coverage

Manual processes are prone to human error. This is an unavoidable aspect of human nature. And when team members are tasked with highly repetitive work, the likelihood of these mistakes grows. Automation is the best way to approach these types of processes, including the monitoring of your Salesforce environment.

Automated Salesforce monitoring tools provide non-stop coverage of your environment—something a manual approach can’t offer.

Data security is a continuous consideration. Gathering all of the insights and metrics you possibly can will help you reinforce your Salesforce security strategy and protect your most valuable asset—your data.

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Next Step…

Minimizing risk in Salesforce DevOps requires a comprehensive approach. And now that you better understand how Salesforce monitoring tools fit into this, let’s go a little further and look into some best practices to secure your platform.

Read “9 Salesforce Best Practices to Prevent Common Security Risks” to learn more.

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FAQs

What are some examples of Salesforce monitoring tools?

There are a wide variety of tools that provide control, insights, and increased visibility to important aspects of a Salesforce environment. Monitoring tools help you oversee and analyze metrics and activities to ensure they meet your organization’s standards. Here are a few different types of Salesforce monitoring tools:

Performance monitoring tools
Security monitoring tools
Compliance monitoring tools
User activity tracking tools
Log management tools

There are many more examples, but the unifying idea is that these tools address various aspects of a Salesforce platform. The way users interact with the data and how it’s stored can all be measured for success.

What are the top Salesforce data risks?

Awareness of potential data risks is the first step toward preventing them. With that in mind, here are some of the most common risks for data breaches or other data-related issues:

Unauthorized access: Poor access controls allow unauthorized users to gain access to protected system data.
Poor data quality: Inaccurate or outdated information compromises the integrity of business processes.
Insecure integrations: The usage of third-party systems needs to be heavily guarded to prevent unauthorized access through the associated application.
Lack of security measures: Tools like encryption are critical to maintaining sufficient levels of data security.
Weak APIs: Vulnerabilities within Salesforce APIs can allow unauthorized individuals to access system data.

How do better insights help Salesforce DevOps?

When it comes to optimizing DevOps processes, information is key. Strong insights lead to well-informed decisions to guide future actions. This results in improved collaboration, earlier notification of issues, and continuous improvement. Each DevOps project is going to have its own unique qualities, but an ability to templatize your approach through analyzing insights will reduce the amount of planning time while simultaneously reducing confusion. Eliminating lag time like this increases ROI, productivity, and job satisfaction for team members. Strong insights lead to smarter DevOps processes.

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If You Aren’t Using Salesforce Monitoring Tools, Your Data Is at Risk

1. Verify Approved Access

2. Track User Activity

3. Data Loss Prevention

4. Real-Time Alerts

5. Compliance Monitoring

6. Dashboards and Reporting

7. Integration With DevSecOps Pipeline

8. Automated Coverage

Next Step…

FAQs

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