Salesforce monitoring tools play a critical role in maintaining actionable visibility into your Salesforce environment, enabling the control you need to stay safe and compliant.
Why It Matters: Unrecognized problems grow worse over time. Overexposed data, improper permissions, faulty code—these things threaten the safety of your data and the stability of your Salesforce environment.
- A study by IBM found that it takes companies an average of 197 days to notice a data breach.
- Data security threats are not always malicious. Simple errors can threaten data, and the likelihood of these errors grows with every individual with access.
Here are 5 tips for increasing visibility in DevOps with Salesforce monitoring tools:
1. Automate Permission Audits
Controlling access to your data is critical to ensure it is not only being handled properly but also protected against costly accidents. As employees are hired, move into new roles, and move out of the company, it grows increasingly difficult to ensure permissions stay true to everyone’s current needs.
Use Salesforce monitoring tools to regularly scan for misconfigured profiles, excessive admin privileges, and role discrepancies that can lead to security risks.
Manual oversight simply isn’t scalable. As your organization grows, the burden of managing permissions becomes untenable. Automation is critical to ensure best practices are consistently adhered to and internal standards for care are maintained.
2. Monitor Code Quality
The code that makes up your applications and updates will either help your system remain secure and productive or actively work against it. Bad code leads to misfires and errors, routes data to the wrong locations, and creates vulnerabilities that can be exploited by bad actors. And if you can’t maintain oversight into the health of your code, you’re flying blind.
Implement static code analysis tools to detect vulnerabilities, inefficient code, and security flaws in your Salesforce environment before they make it to production.
These tools give your developers the visibility they need to guarantee healthy code before pushing it to a live environment. This reduces the cost of fixing errors found late in the development lifecycle, supports data security, and eliminates technical debt.
3. Track Deployment History
System updates don’t always align perfectly with existing coding structures. And if you’re not tracking your deployment history, you won’t be able to quickly identify and resolve issues as they pop up. Teams struggle to pinpoint the source of bugs, misconfigurations, or security vulnerabilities when they don’t have a clear record of what was deployed, when, and by whom.
CI/CD tools maintain a detailed log of changes across sandboxes and production environments to ensure traceability throughout the integration and deployment of updates.
These tools help teams quickly pinpoint problematic deployments, roll back changes when necessary, and maintain a clear audit trail for security and compliance purposes. By leveraging deployment tracking, DevOps teams can streamline development workflows, reduce downtime, and enhance overall system stability.
4. Ensure Data Integrity with Automated Backups
Accidents happen. Data outages and corruption can be the result of so many potential sources that it’s impossible to completely protect against them. Your Salesforce data is the lifeblood of your organization. Losing access to it results in lost business opportunities and, ultimately, lost revenue. It’s essential to prepare for worst-case scenarios.
Automated data backup and recovery tools need to be implemented to cover your data so you know they’re there when you need them.
A recent data backup after an outage puts the control right back into your hands. Not only does this enable your teams to continue working, but it also avoids potentially knocking your organization out of compliance with data security regulations.
5. Leverage Automated Policies to Enforce Compliance
Speaking of data security regulations, adherence to best practices across your organization is essential to remain compliant. It’s impossible to manually oversee the actions of all team members, which is why automated Salesforce monitoring tools are critical.
Implement monitoring solutions that check for compliance with industry standards like GDPR, HIPAA, and SOX as well as internal policies.
These automated solutions provide the visibility and control you need to remain both secure and compliant in the face of evolving data security threats.
Next Step…
Consistent visibility into the health of your code has a direct relationship with the quality of your applications and updates. Static code analysis is a nonnegotiable tool for empowering your team to create the strongest updates possible.
Read our blog,7 Tips for Implementing Code-Scanning Tools in Salesforce DevOps, to learn how to get started with this critical monitoring tool.