How to Protect Your Salesforce Environment with DevOps Tools
Salesforce DevOps tools are a critical aspect of maintaining a healthy IT environment by reducing errors and vulnerabilities that could otherwise be exploited.
Why It Matters: Cybersecurity is a major consideration for organizations in every industry. Threats continue to increase, and falling behind on protection can lead to costly data intrusions and compliance failures.
- Breaches in cloud environments have increased 75% over the last year.
- The emergence of code-generating AI has increased the reach of cybercriminals.
Here are 7 ways Salesforce DevOps tools support a strong data security strategy:
- Version Control Allows You to Quickly Correct Mistakes
- Continuous Integration Automates Testing
- Continuous Delivery Automates Deployment Processes
- Sandbox Management Keeps Everything in Sync
- Security Posture Management Maintains an Updated Overview
- Backup and Recovery Have You Covered After an Emergency
- Dashboards and Reports Provide Audit Trails for Compliance
1. Version Control Allows You to Quickly Correct Mistakes
Even the best developers are going to make mistakes. And when these mistakes are merged with the main repository, it can create a massive amount of work to rectify changes if they aren’t tracked with a version control system.
Version control empowers teams to quickly revert to a stable state when mistakes are found.
Cleaning up these mistakes creates a more stable update and, therefore, a more stable Salesforce environment.
2. Continuous Integration Automates Testing
There needs to be multiple layers of testing to find and fix any errors, bugs, or mistakes that will impact the operational structure of your updates and applications. Every mistake is a vulnerability—either to security or the overall success of your DevOps project.
Continuous integration (CI) automates testing of the compilation of coding updates to guarantee a stable application.
Automating tasks that were previously performed manually increases the reliability of your releases and the productivity of your team.
3. Continuous Delivery Automates Deployment Processes
The other side of CI is to utilize a continuous delivery (CD) tool. These tools work hand-in-hand to automate deployment and testing processes, so your team can maintain proper oversight of code quality.
CI/CD is the cornerstone of an optimized automated release strategy that increases release velocity, enabling your team to be more agile in responding to data security threats.
Use these tools in conjunction with each other to cover critical bases in software development.
4. Sandbox Management Keeps Everything in Sync
Multi-developer teams are a great way to quickly produce large updates. However, creating multiple sandboxes can lead to issues if the environments are not homogenous. Manual configurations aren’t reliable, so using an automated sandbox management tool is essential to produce reliable results.
Regularly refresh sandboxes to reflect the production environment.
An automated tool can be used for data seeding to keep these environments in sync. Data masking can also be used if these environments contain sensitive data.
5. Security Posture Management Maintains an Updated Overview
Your Salesforce environment is likely your main container of data, which means it’s probably huge.
An automated security posture management tool should be used to oversee critical considerations like permissions, access controls, and the health of your code.
This tool will ensure nothing slips between the cracks and creates a security vulnerability.
6. Backup and Recovery Have You Covered After an Emergency
You can never completely guard against a data loss event. There are simply too many potential sources of data loss, so every security strategy needs to include a data backup and recovery tool.
Institute repeated data backups so you always have a contemporary backup to restore should you lose connectivity with your platform.
Not only will this help secure your environment, but it will also assist in maintaining compliance with data security regulations.
7. Dashboards and Reports Provide Audit Trails for Compliance
Speaking of compliance, it’s not enough to simply adhere to regulations—you must also prove your adherence. This is made possible by audit trails, which can be maintained with the help of DevOps tools.
Set up automated reports that cover considerations such as access logs, export reports, and anything else related to handling sensitive data.
These reports make it very easy for organizations to prove compliance when a regulatory audit occurs.
Next Step…
CI/ CD tools have a lot to offer. We explained above how important they can be for security, so now it’s time to dig into how they impact quality and efficiency.
Check out our blog, 6 Ways to Leverage Salesforce CI/CD for Scalability and Efficiency, and dig into even more ways these tools expand your DevOps potential.
FAQs
What are the biggest threats to my Salesforce data?
When many people think about a data security threat, they picture a malicious hacker breaking into their system to steal data. And while this is definitely a threat, it’s not the only thing to protect against. In fact, the biggest threat to your Salesforce data is actually your own team members! A simple accident when handling data can lead to costly accidental deletions and even exposures. Updated permission settings will go a long way toward shoring up these vulnerabilities. And once internal threats are addressed, you can move to securing your access controls, which guard against cybercriminals breaking into your Salesforce environment.
What are three simple things I can do today to make my Salesforce environment safer?
You can protect your Salesforce from the outside and inside while providing a safety net by addressing three major considerations. First, strengthen your access controls by implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA). This adds an extra layer of security on login screens beyond passwords, which can be compromised. To protect your system from the inside, ensure user permissions are updated so every team member is only able to access the data they need to perform their duties. And finally, maintain regular backups of your Salesforce data and establish a clear data recovery plan. This ensures that even if the unthinkable happens, you will be able to quickly return to operations and minimize the costly impacts of downtime.
How do I find DevOps tools that work best in my Salesforce instance?
Every Salesforce DevOps pipeline is unique. Finding the tools that work best for your strategy requires taking an honest look at your current procedures and evaluating them against your goals. Research the available tools such as version control, continuous integration, automated deployments, and static code analysis to determine whether any of them will fill gaps in your current coverage. Generally, finding a DevSecOps platform that includes all of these tools like AutoRABIT will ensure the tools work together seamlessly to eliminate errors.
