Dynamic reporting dashboards are critical for compiling compliance metrics in Salesforce and proving adherence to regulatory data security requirements.
Why It Matters: Organizations in regulated industries like healthcare and finance are subject to specific requirements for how their data is handled and stored. And when an audit occurs, it’s critical to know how to prove compliance.
- Failing to properly protect sensitive data leads to falling out of compliance with data security regulations, which can result in stiff fines and penalties.
- Maintaining compliance builds trust in healthcare and finance customers because it shows the organization’s attention to detail.
Here are seven ways organizations in regulated industries can stay on top of compliance reporting in Salesforce:
1. Centralize Compliance Data Collection
Compiling, arranging, and storing your data is critical to proving compliance with data security regulations. But if you don’t know where to find your metrics, complying with audit requirements will be much more difficult.
DevOps tools like CI/CD work to centralize processes across sandboxes, staging environments, and production orgs to provide a consolidated view of system changes.
Logs, change records, and access data can all be automatically pulled into a single source of truth for auditors.
2. Automate Change Tracking to Maintain a Clear Audit Trail
Your team is constantly making changes to your system data and metadata. You need to keep track of these changes to walk them back if an error occurs or to prove when something occurred for an audit.
Dynamic dashboards in Salesforce automatically track all changes to metadata and configurations, logging who made the change, when it happened, and the reason.
This traceability is critical for HIPAA and SOC 2 compliance.
3. Monitor User Access and Permissions
Locking down who can access your data is essential to maintaining compliance. Automated tracking and monitoring are crucial to stay on top of a constantly evolving Salesforce environment.
A security posture management scanner like AutoRABIT Guard scans for overly permissive profiles or permission sets, and it can highlight violations of least-privilege policies.
Documenting these updates and the ability to provide ongoing oversight of these considerations are crucial for adhering to GDPR and HIPAA requirements.
4. Leverage Static Code Analysis
Proactive risk mitigation is a requirement for many compliance frameworks. Faulty code leads to misfires and errors that create potential back doors for cybercriminals to access sensitive materials.
Static code analysis catches vulnerabilities in updates and applications before they reach production.
Scanning your code against security best practices automatically flags vulnerabilities and can enforce compliance with OWASP, HIPAA, or GDPR coding standards.
5. Implement Continuous Monitoring
You can’t fix a problem if you don’t know it exists. And when it comes time for an audit, any vulnerabilities hiding in your system have the potential to knock you out of compliance.
Monitor system events and configurations with an automated scanning tool for data exposure risks, such as changes to field-level security or unexpected data exports.
Data exfiltration or unauthorized exports must be identified quickly to comply with standards like GDPR or HIPAA’s breach notification rules.
6. Generate Scheduled Compliance Reports
Consistent summaries of audit requirement metrics prepare you to prove compliance at any time. The security tools you use to protect your data can likely be used to produce reports and dynamic dashboards in Salesforce.
AutoRABIT’s DevSecOps suite provides customizable reports covering metadata changes, user access, code quality, and deployment history—automated and export-ready for auditors.
This reduces manual work and ensures consistency in documentation for external audits.
7. Map DevOps Metrics to Regulatory Requirements
The metrics you compile are likely to be very technical and difficult to arrange in a manageable way. Your DevOps tooling will come in handy once again to simplify the process.
Leverage your tool’s report-generating capability to present metrics in formats that align with compliance frameworks.
You can customize dashboards to show adherence to specific standards, such as mapping code coverage to SOC 2 policies or access control to GDPR.
Next Step…
An organization focused on security from top to bottom is more prepared to achieve and maintain regulatory compliance. Are you doing everything you can to protect your sensitive data?
Read our ebook, Staying Safe from the Inside Out: Creating a Secure Culture in Salesforce DevOps, to learn what you can do to support a secure and reliable Salesforce environment.