An efficient Salesforce DevOps pipeline is beneficial to every business. However, the importance of services provided by healthcare companies to their customers heightens the necessity of creating reliable updates and applications.
An optimized Salesforce DevOps pipeline keeps costs low for healthcare companies while helping them produce products that can positively impact the lives of their customers.
A secure environment is essential for many reasons. Of course, you don’t want to compromise the sensitive information of your employees and customers. This imperative becomes even more important when government regulations are factored in.
Salesforce DevOps helps secure your applications and environment when all the necessary precautions are taken. Utilizing powerful DevOps tools helps your team members to avoid potentially costly mistakes that can open your system up to data loss events.
Healthcare companies provide essential services, but they are still businesses. They can’t continue to provide these services if they are spending too much money. Part of optimizing a DevOps pipeline is ensuring that it remains profitable.
So how can a healthcare company work to avoid security vulnerabilities? What can be done to increase productivity while keeping overhead costs low? And how can a healthcare company consistently produce releases that benefit their customers?
Here are 7 ways healthcare companies can get the most from their Salesforce DevOps pipeline:
1. Institute Automation
Proper usage of team member time has a major impact on your return on investment and overall productivity within your Salesforce DevOps pipeline. Tools are available to extend the capabilities of your team members while also freeing them up to focus on more pressing matters.
Automated tools are available for many stages throughout the DevOps pipeline to increase quality, support data security, and reduce overall costs.
Tools such as static code analysis, continuous integration and deployment, and more are available to ensure proper functionality of your applications. Healthcare companies can’t afford simple mistakes to contribute to a faulty release. Automation is your best chance at avoiding a failed deployment.
2. Use Threat Modeling
We’ve mentioned the importance of data security for healthcare companies—both in protecting sensitive data and the government regulations dictating how to do so. The problem is that threats to your data security measures are constantly changing. It’s impossible to shore up potential vulnerabilities if you don’t know they exist.
Threat modeling is the process of analyzing your Salesforce DevOps pipeline—along with your Salesforce environment as a whole—to find potential threats and prioritize efforts to address them.
The vulnerabilities found in this assessment can be addressed at every stage throughout the DevOps pipeline. This approach is what’s referred to as DevSecOps and is the best way to create as secure an environment as possible.
3. Establish a Data Governance Framework
Strong data makes your applications more secure and informs your methods and procedures. There is going to be a lot of data throughout your Salesforce DevOps environment. It can be difficult to keep track of everything and get the most from the potential insights.
Data governance is a series of procedures and practices aimed at maintaining a high-quality pool of system data.
Categorizing and managing your system data according to internal standards provides a series of benefits:
- Improves reporting capabilities
- Helps inform automation deployment
- Provides oversight for corporate assets
- Improves efficiency in procurement
- Aids compliance by meeting legal requirements
- Provides insight for marketing efforts
Here are a few tips on creating a data governance framework of your own.
4. Educate Team Members
Powerful tools will go a long way to improve your DevOps efforts, but the pipeline simply won’t function without your team members. And just how they can be a great asset, team members can also create quality issues and security vulnerabilities if their actions aren’t consistent and intentional.
Encouraging open communication, providing clear instructions, and establishing best practices removes any confusion and allows team members to confidently focus on their tasks.
Educated team members are less likely to make mistakes that can impact data security, proper functionality of the eventual product, and overall efficiency of the DevOps pipeline. Healthcare companies need to maintain a consistently high level of quality and security. Strong team members go a long way toward accomplishing this.
5. Incorporate Reliable Backup & Recovery Solutions
Preparation is key for a successful DevOps strategy. And part of that preparation includes worst-case scenarios. A data loss event can be catastrophic. And for healthcare companies, it can mean fines and penalties from regulatory bodies on top of the standard negative consequences of losing all your system data.
Salesforce data backup and recovery tools are an essential aspect of a complete DevOps strategy and must be incorporated as soon as possible.
Loss of system functionality is simply not an option for healthcare companies. Your customers rely on you for essential services. Outages can come from a variety of causes—cyberattacks, power failures, natural disasters, team member error—and the only way to quickly return to operations is with a recent data backup.
6. Analyze Reports and Insights
Your needs—and the needs of your customers—are always changing. This is why a Salesforce DevOps pipeline is so beneficial. It allows you to quickly produce updates and applications to address these evolving needs. Another aspect of this is updating your DevOps processes themselves for heightened efficiency and efficacy.
Keeping an eye on these factors can provide actionable insights:
- Success and failure rates for deployments
- System access and login records
- Company-wide permissions settings
- Time stamps for code changes
- Accountability measures
A variety of potential improvements are available by setting up automated reports and analyzing them for opportunities. However, manually compiling this information will be incredibly time-consuming. Examine these reports and stay on top of your changing DevOps landscape.
7. Utilize a Singular Platform
A complete Salesforce DevOps strategy is going to include a variety of tools. However, piecing together these tools from numerous sources will create unnecessary complexity and potentially lead to incompatibilities.
A complete DevOps platform ensures all tools work together flawlessly and can be accessed from a singular interface.
Optimizing your DevOps efforts means maintaining a high level of usability. There’s no need to overcomplicate the process. Utilizing a singular DevOps platform streamlines your efforts and reduces confusion for your team members.
Healthcare companies need to provide the best possible experience for their customers. An optimized DevOps pipeline is the most reliable way to accomplish this.
