Best Practices for Salesforce Data Management and Security

Effective Salesforce data management and security are crucial for organizations aiming to maximize their CRM potential while safeguarding sensitive information. As Salesforce continues to be a cornerstone for customer relationship management, ensuring data integrity, accessibility, and security becomes increasingly vital. This article explores best practices for Salesforce data management and security, covering essential strategies such as data governance, access controls, encryption, regular audits, and compliance with industry regulations. By adhering to these best practices, businesses can protect their data assets, enhance operational efficiency, and maintain the trust of their customers.

In this article, we will discuss the top five Salesforce data management and security best practices you should consider implementing, if you have not done so already. 

1. Take Care of Your Data Hygiene 

Data hygiene is making sure that bad data is not present in your Salesforce records. One of the biggest reasons lots of companies struggle with poor data hygiene is that it involves lots of tedious processes. For example, you need to make sure that your data does not contain duplicate, outdated, or incorrect information on a daily basis. Since you don't want your sales reps to comb through hundreds or even thousands of records looking for bad data, consider implementing the following processes: 

• Make it a habit to regularly check your data: If you are constantly on top of what's going on with your data, even the periodic missing or incorrect data will not have a big impact. You will be able to catch errors more frequently, instead of just letting all of this bad data pile up. 
• Use the right tools: Try to find tools that will automatically scan your Salesforce data and identify areas that need fixing. There are also tools out there that will help you remove duplicates, fake contact information, and other types of bad data. This level of automation will save you a lot of time and can help improve confidence in the data you already have. 
• Data hygiene education: If you have implemented some form of automation, but you're not seeing the results that you hoped for, consider adding a personal touch with personal coaching. This can be especially effective if you are seeing specific areas of data hygiene that need improvement and providing your team with information on the importance of this area can make a big difference. 

2. Implement Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

Salesforce allows admins to determine which user groups will be given access to specific information. There are object-level and field security sets such as permission sets, permission set groups, profiles, and more. On the individual user level, there are record-level settings, user roles, and sharing rules that control what each user is allowed to see and edit. One best practice we recommend when setting your RBAC permissions is to create a table of user types and specify the level of access each user type will need. You should also include the access permissions for each object as well as the fields and records within that object. Refer to this table when you are setting up your user permissions. 

The most straightforward way of controlling access to data is with object-level permissions. You can prevent users from viewing, creating, modifying, or deleting any particular object, including both built-in or custom objects, with object permissions. If you want users to have access to an object, but prevent them from accessing particular fields, this is where field-level security or permissions will come in handy. With these permissions, you can control who sees, edits, or deletes a value in a given field, which allows you to protect sensitive fields without having to hide the entire object. 

3. Have a Data Governance Framework in Place

Data governance can be defined as a set of rules or policies by which each business uses its data and how it makes decisions based on that data. This is particularly relevant to large companies since they are often subject to industry regulations. Consider the following scenario: your sales team is inputting valuable data about a customer into your Salesforce. The marketing automation system tracks engagement across various engagement channels. The customer service team keeps its eyes on certain key performance indicators. All of this collects a lot of data, how do you know if each team is using the data correctly? This is where a data governance strategy can be very valuable. 

When creating your data governance framework, consider the following rules and policies: 

• Access: Who can view and use which data? 
• Accuracy: Are there any provisions in place to make sure that the information is up to date and does not contain any errors? 
• Privacy: When your teams handle various data, especially personally identifiable information, how do you make sure it remains private? 
• Security: How safe is your data from a cyber attack? You should also take precautions to keep your data safe from potential bad actors from inside your company. 
• Retention: How old is the data that you currently have and how long do you need to keep it? Are there any business or legal requirements that stipulate that it needs to be kept for a certain period of time? 

4. Conduct Regular Data Backups and Recovery Planning

Nowadays, companies are becoming increasingly reliant on their technological tools, while the number of cyber attacks and other threats to data continues to increase. If your mission-critical assets become compromised, it could be disastrous for your business reputation and have a significant impact on your operations and company finances. A best practice is for organizations to update security recovery strategies even more frequently than disaster recovery strategies, and include cybersecurity leaders on the disaster recovery team. 

One way you can combat data loss is by utilizing a built-in functionality in Salesforce such as Salesforce Backup. This is a powerful tool that can help you guard against data loss caused by system failures, human error, and cyberattacks with just a few clicks — and get your data back. The fact that this is a Salesforce native solution makes it especially useful to admins since it avoids the hassles that come with customizations of third-party tools such as custom coding or navigating complex integrations,

Beyond any particular tools you use, there should be a data backup plan in place that sets forth rules on how data and metadata will be restored and to what extent it can be restored. After all, your users will not be satisfied if business operations continue to be adversely affected because you could only restore a portion of your lost data many months after the initial data loss occurred. Therefore, successful data recovery means restoring all of your lost data accurately and within a reasonable time frame. During your data backup planning, be sure to discuss two important concepts: recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). Think of these concepts in the following terms: 

• RPO: How long has it been since your data was last backed up? 
• RTO: How long will it take to get your data fully restored?

These two targets will give you some goals to aim for when setting up your backup strategy. 

5. Monitor and Audit Data Access

Auditing gives you an understanding of how your data is being used, which can give you big clues in spotting potential data breaches. It is important to note that while Salesforce does have some auditing features, it alone will not defend your data against potential threats. This is why it's important to have someone on your team conduct regular audits to detect potential abuse. Pay particularly close attention to the following usage trends: 

• Record modification fields: All of your Salesforce objects contain fields that store the name of the user who created a particular record and the person who last modified it. This will give you a starting point for creating an audit trail. 
• Login history: Salesforce gives you the ability to view the successful and failed login attempts over the past. six months. 
• Field history tracking: Consider enabling auditing for each individual field to track changes that were made in the values of selected fields. While auditing of custom objects is available, only some standard objects allow field-level auditing. 
• Create an audit trail: Use an audit trail to monitor and analyze the primary and secondary identity verification audit records of customers to detect potential cases of compliance fraud and identity breaches.

Securing Success: The Strategic Imperative of Salesforce Data Management

Incorporating robust data management and security best practices within Salesforce is not just a technical requirement but a strategic imperative for any organization. By implementing comprehensive data governance policies, enforcing strict access controls, leveraging encryption, and conducting regular audits, businesses can ensure that their Salesforce environment remains secure, compliant, and efficient. Moreover, staying updated with the latest security features and regulations will help organizations anticipate and mitigate risks proactively. Ultimately, a well-secured Salesforce instance not only protects sensitive information but also fosters trust with customers, enabling long-term success in a data-driven world.