Data management in Salesforce doesn’t have to be confusing. Here are 7 key strategies to improve governance and streamline processes.
Data management in Salesforce relies on intentional and consistent attention. These key strategies improve governance, streamlining security and productivity across your team.
Why It Matters: You can’t protect data if you don’t know where to find it. And if your systems don’t provide visibility across all processes, mistakes become more likely.
- Manual processes are slow and prone to errors, especially in highly repetitive tasks.
- Whether accidentally deleting a file or falling for phishing scams, human error remains the leading cause of data loss events.
Here are seven key strategies for stronger governance in your Salesforce environment:
1. Establish a Centralized Governance Framework
Considerations like user access, code quality, data handling, change management, and compliance need to have standardized rules and oversight to guide how an organization manages and controls its systems, data, and users.
Define standardized policies and then enforce them consistently across all orgs using automation, documentation, and regular audits.
Leverage a security posture management tool to act as a guardrail to ensure policies are being consistently followed across your organization.
2. Implement Role-Based Access Controls
Controlling who can access sensitive information drastically reduces the likelihood of costly errors. Role-based access controls (RBACs) ensure users only access data and functionalities pertinent to their responsibilities, significantly reducing the risk of unauthorized actions or data breaches.
Assess and document current job functions and access needs, define clear roles, then configure Salesforce profiles and permission sets accordingly.
These settings should be reviewed and updated on a regular basis to account for organization changes and evolving security requirements.
3. Enforce Code Quality Standards
Bad code leads to faulty updates and applications. Misfires have the potential to route data to incorrect locations, making it difficult to find when it’s needed. Data management in Salesforce relies on proper functionality to prevent delays and security vulnerabilities.
Align internal coding standards with guidelines like OWASP and configure a static code analysis tool to ensure best practices are maintained.
Automating code testing saves time and heightens the reliability of your updates and applications.
4. Automate Change Management Processes
Without clear processes and controls, unauthorized or untested changes can reach production, causing data loss, broken functionality, or compliance violations. Strong governance relies on well-functioning processes, which is supported when teams automate change management.
Integrating CI/CD tools, establishing version control, and defining approval workflows help Salesforce teams build a secure, scalable foundation for managing change.
Strong change management enhances data governance by ensuring that all changes are authorized, well-documented, and compliant—protecting data integrity and supporting regulatory requirements.
5. Monitor and Audit Configuration Changes
Changes to metadata can have wide-ranging impacts. It’s important to ensure they are logged, reviewed, and aligned with organizational policies.
Automated continuous monitoring helps teams establish regular reviews to ensure configurations remain aligned with governance standards.
Auditing and monitoring configuration changes help maintain the integrity of configurations and allow teams to quickly identify and resolve issues.
6. Regularly Back Up Org Data and Metadata
Data outages can be catastrophic. Every minute your system isn’t operational endangers compliance, while costing a lot of money. A recent backup of both Salesforce data and metadata is a lifesaver when the system goes dark.
Schedule automated incremental and complete data backups according to recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) goals.
Data management is impossible in Salesforce if your data disappears. Backups ensure continuous access to your data.
7. Set Up Real-Time Alerts and Dashboards
Data issues aren’t always apparent. They can hide in the background, slowly corrupting various parts of your system until something breaks, and they’re finally found. Locating these issues before they become widespread problems is crucial.
Monitor deployment health, code coverage, and org-level changes in real time with automatically generated reports and dashboards provided by automated DevOps tools.
Faster resolution of data issues and better oversight strengthen data governance processes and keep your Salesforce environment secure and productive.
Next Step…
Data management and data security go hand in hand. These considerations require constant attention because a simple mistake can lead to huge consequences. Common misconfigurations can lead to data loss and create data security risks.
Read our blog, If You’re Not Scanning for Misconfigurations, You’re Already Behind, to learn how you can shore up these common and dangerous vulnerabilities.