Security in Salesforce can’t be treated like a quarterly task to check off a list. For industries such as financial services and healthcare, Salesforce has become the backbone of mission-critical operations. It holds sensitive data, powers customer engagement, and integrates with countless systems.
This visibility and centrality make it a prime target for attackers. The stakes of a breach go far beyond financial loss, threatening patient trust, client confidentiality, and regulatory standing. Yet many organizations still approach Salesforce security and compliance as if they were a static set of controls to document once a year.
The reality is that Salesforce is dynamic. Permissions evolve, integrations expand, and new features appear regularly. Attackers are increasingly exploiting SaaS platforms, while misconfigurations remain one of the leading causes of data exposure.
The future belongs to organizations that move beyond checklists toward a culture of security: embedding governance, controls, and vigilance into the way Salesforce is used every day.
We’ll explore these seven aspects of elevating security and compliance in Salesforce:
- Start With Risk, Not Features
- Treat Permissions Like Hazardous Materials
- Classify Data in Salesforce, Then Engineer Controls Around It
- Shift Left in the Salesforce Lifecycle
- Monitor Continuously for SaaS-Native Threats and Missteps
- Build Compliance Into Daily Operations, Not Year-End Scrambles
- Prepare for “When,” Not “If”
1. Start With Risk, Not Features
The first step in building a culture is defining how your organization understands and manages risk in Salesforce. This means developing a clear security charter, which is a guiding document that shapes all subsequent decisions.
The charter should start with crown-jewel mapping: identify the regulated and business-critical data stored in Salesforce.
- For financial services, that might include personally identifiable information (PII), loan records, or transaction histories.
- For healthcare, it could involve electronic protected health information (ePHI) and patient communications.
Next, articulate threat-informed assumptions. In today’s environment, you must assume that credential theft, OAuth token abuse, misconfigured guest access, and over-permissioned accounts are not edge cases but expected attack vectors.
Finally, make security a shared accountability. Salesforce product owners, administrators, compliance leaders, and legal teams should all share responsibility for outcomes. This ensures security decisions aren’t made in isolation but as part of a cohesive strategy. The Verizon 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report attributes about 60% of breaches to human error, privilege misuse, or misconfiguration—challenges that governance and shared accountability directly address.
2. Treat Permissions Like Hazardous Materials
Over-permissioned accounts are one of the most common vulnerabilities in Salesforce. The platform’s flexibility makes it easy to grant sweeping access for convenience, but these decisions accumulate into serious risk. A culture of security requires treating access like hazardous material: tightly controlled, reviewed regularly, and granted only when absolutely necessary.
Start by shifting from broad profiles to permission sets and groups, which allow for more granular control. Implement time-bound, just-in-time elevation so that administrators or developers receive higher risk permissions only for specific, documented tasks. Service accounts and OAuth integrations should follow the same principle—rotate secrets frequently, constrain scopes, and require multifactor authentication for all privileged identities.
The importance of this discipline is underscored by public cases where Salesforce Community sites leaked sensitive data because of overly permissive guest access. These weren’t exotic attacks. They were configuration oversights. By building access reviews and enforcement into your daily operations, you prevent these small mistakes from becoming front-page headlines.
3. Classify Data in Salesforce, Then Engineer Controls Around It
Security is only as strong as your understanding of what you’re protecting. In regulated industries, the ability to classify and label sensitive data in Salesforce is foundational.
Automated classification tools can detect regulated data. Once labeled, records can be tied to policy-driven sharing rules that prevent inappropriate exposure. For example, if a record is labeled “high sensitivity,” it should be impossible to share it with unauthenticated guest users or expose it through a public link.
In addition, implement data loss prevention (DLP) for Salesforce. Monitor for large exports of sensitive records, unusual report activity, or mass API extractions. Controls that throttle or block downloads in real time can prevent a misstep—or a malicious insider—from causing a reportable breach.
4. Shift Left in the Salesforce Lifecycle
Salesforce is not static software. It’s a constantly evolving environment of flows, Apex code, Lightning Web Components, and integrations. This means that waiting until release or audit time to evaluate security is far too late. A DevSecOps mindset is essential.
Integrate pre-commit and pre-deploy checks into your pipeline to identify risky code or configurations before they ever reach production. Scan for hard-coded secrets, unsafe CRUD/FLS patterns, or overly broad sharing rules. Implement config drift detection to compare production orgs against hardened baselines, alerting when new risks are introduced.
Equally important is managing dependencies and integrations. Every connected app and middleware solution should be reviewed for appropriate scopes, callback URLs, and access controls. Finally, build in evidence by design: automatically capture scan results, approvals, and test logs as part of your pipeline, so that audits become a byproduct of secure operations rather than a disruptive scramble.
This approach not only reduces risk, but also accelerates delivery, freeing teams from late-stage security bottlenecks.
5. Monitor Continuously for SaaS-Native Threats and Missteps
Traditional network and endpoint tools don’t see what happens inside Salesforce. To detect missteps and attacks, you need Salesforce-specific solutions.
Start with behavior analytics that monitor for anomalous actions such as large report exports, unusual login locations, or suspicious API activity. Pair this with security posture management—continuous evaluation of org settings and internal policies.
Regular exposure hunting is equally important. Many high-profile Salesforce incidents have stemmed from something as simple as a misconfigured public link. By proactively scanning for these exposures and rolling them back immediately, you close one of the most common and preventable gaps.
A true culture of security doesn’t assume controls will always be perfect. It assumes mistakes will happen, and it builds a safety net of continuous monitoring and rapid remediation to catch them before they escalate.
6. Build Compliance Into Daily Operations, Not Year-End Scrambles
For financial services and healthcare organizations, compliance frameworks such as HIPAA and GDPR are not optional. But too often, compliance is treated as a once-a-year project, leading to rushed evidence collection and brittle controls. A better approach is to weave compliance directly into daily operations.
This begins with mapping Salesforce controls to regulatory requirements. For HIPAA, that means access restrictions, audit logging, and data integrity safeguards. Evidence collection should also be automated wherever possible: logs of who accessed what, reports of data exports, and records of permission changes.
Don’t overlook third-party applications. AppExchange tools and middleware integrations should be treated as vendors, with security reviews and least-privilege scopes. Organizations that operationalize compliance are prepared for scrutiny, not scrambling to prepare after the fact.
7. Prepare for “When,” Not “If”
No security program is complete without a clear, rehearsed plan for incident response. Salesforce often falls outside the scope of broader incident response exercises, leaving teams unprepared for SaaS-specific events. A backup and recovery strategy is critical.
Plan and rehearse tabletop exercises that simulate realistic Salesforce incidents: a token theft, mass data export, guest user exposure, or compromised integration. Document containment tactics, such as revoking OAuth tokens, freezing user accounts, disabling connected apps, and tightening IP restrictions. These actions need to be tested in advance, so they can be executed quickly under pressure.
Finally, ensure you can preserve forensic evidence—logs, object history, and sharing snapshots—while aligning notification triggers with regulatory timelines. In healthcare and finance, breach notification clocks can start ticking quickly. Organizations that plan ahead not only minimize impact, but also demonstrate to regulators and customers that they take their obligations seriously.
Make Security the Way You Operate
For organizations in regulated industries, Salesforce is both a strategic asset and a potential liability. The challenge isn’t just sophisticated adversaries. It’s the daily complexity of permissions, integrations, and human error. Treating Salesforce security as a checklist item will not withstand the pace of change or the scale of risk.
The alternative is a culture of security: one that begins with clear governance, extends through access control and data classification, embeds into the development lifecycle, and remains vigilant through monitoring, compliance integration, and incident readiness. The payoff is more than regulatory alignment; it’s resilience, customer trust, and the ability to use Salesforce with confidence as your business grows.
In the end, the organizations that thrive will be those that don’t just comply with security standards but live them every day.