Is Salesforce Shield Right for You?
Salesforce Shield is a powerful security tool designed to provide organizations with enhanced data protection, governance, and compliance capabilities. However, it must be implemented with a clear understanding of its strengths and limitations. Below, we'll explore best practices for using Salesforce Shield and help you assess whether your organization truly needs this additional layer of security.
What Is Salesforce Shield?
Platform Encryption: Encrypts sensitive data at rest, ensuring that even if your system is compromised, the data remains unreadable to unauthorized users.
Event Monitoring: Tracks user activity within Salesforce, helping organizations detect abnormal behavior or identify security incidents in real time.
Field Audit Trail: Extends Salesforce's native auditing capabilities, enabling organizations to track changes to field data over long periods, up to ten years, which is particularly useful for compliance and forensic investigations.
These features make Salesforce Shield essential for organizations dealing with sensitive or regulated data, such as healthcare providers (HIPAA compliance) or financial institutions (PCI DSS compliance). But the decision to implement Shield should go beyond simply ticking a compliance box.
Understanding Shield’s Role in Data Protection
While Salesforce Shield offers robust encryption to protect data, it doesn't replace essential security measures such as field-level security, user roles, and profiles. Encryption prevents unauthorized parties from reading data, but if a user's credentials are compromised and they have access to sensitive data fields, encryption will not stop them from viewing it. Field-level security and permissions must be paired up with Salesforce Shield to fully safeguard your data.
Additionally, its important to note that Salesforce Shield's encryption does not affect data visibility for authorized users; if a user has the right permissions, they will still be able to view encrypted data in the user interface.
Key Best Practices
Define Your Threat Model: Not all organizations need to encrypt all data. Start by identifying your organization's most likely threats. Consider regulatory requirements, internal security needs, and the type of data your organization processes. This analysis will help you determine which data, if any, to encrypt.
Implement Layered Security: While Shield protects data at rest, other security measures like field-level security, user permissions, and authentication methods are critical for protecting against internal threats or compromised credentials.
Monitor User Activity: A key feature of Salesforce Shield is Event Monitoring which provides detailed logs of user interactions within the platform. Regularly reviewing these logs for unusual patterns can help you detect potential breaches early.
Regularly Review and Update Encryption Policies: Encryption is not a one-time setup. As a business evolves, they need to regularly review their encryption and access control policies to ensure compliance within the regulatorily environment.
Employee Training: Ensure that your employees understand the purpose and functionality of Salesforce Shield. Training on security awareness and proper use of the tool will help reduce accidental exposure of sensitive data.
Use Deterministic Encryption for Filtering: If your organization requires users to filter or search encrypted data (e.g., for reports or list views), consider using deterministic encryption. This allows for case-sensitive or exact-match searches on encrypted fields without compromising data security.
When Should You Consider Salesforce Shield?
If your organization handles highly sensitive data or operates in a regulated industry, the additional protection provided by Salesforce Shield can help you meet compliance requirements while minimizing the risk of data breaches. Shield's encryption ensures that data stored within Salesforce is inaccessible to unauthorized parties.
However, organizations that primarily handle non-sensitive data may find that Shield is simply not necessary. In these cases, using Salesforce’s native field-level security and permission controls may do the trick just as well.
Another consideration is how Shield’s encryption may impact search index performance or third-party apps. Shield Platform Encryption does provide an option to encrypt search index files and CRM Analytics datasets, but this can affect performance depending on the size of the data.
Getting Help with Salesforce Shield
Implementing Salesforce Shield requires a lot of careful consideration of your organization’s data handling practices. For most the challenge lies in determining what level of protection is truly needed. At Saym Services, our certified Salesforce consultants can assist in assessing your organization's specific needs and help you navigate the complexities of implementing Salesforce Shield.
Get in touch with us today to schedule a free consultation! Our team can help you determine whether Salesforce Shield is the right solution for your business and, if so, guide you through deployment.
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