Salesforce Shield: Guide to Encryption, Monitoring, and Implementation

As the use of AI is increasing, cybersecurity attacks are rising and are a top concern for Salesforce businesses. Leveraging the AI capabilities within Salesforce is something organizations need but the rising security threats restrict them from utilizing its potential. 

Hence understanding these concerns, Salesforce introduces the Salesforce Shield, providing an extra layer of security to businesses. Deploying this within the platform strengthens the security and protects sensitive data from internal and external security threats.

Further, this blog delves into what does Salesforce Shield includes, why this is important, its features, pros and limitations, and more. 

Let’s dive in!

What is Salesforce Shield?

Salesforce Shield is a suite of powerful tools providing an extra level of security to protect businesses’ sensitive data and information. It can prevent cybersecurity attacks, manage data encryption, retain historical data, and meet changing data privacy and compliance rules. 

Importance of Salesforce Shield

It provides rigorous security measures to protect critical data in Salesforce. With its rich features, users can access real-time pulse to know who can access specific data. 

Salesforce Shield provides reports for unusual or unauthorized activity, leading to preventing sensitive information timely. The robust set of features allows you to encrypt data and help identify and categorize sensitive data to enhance security posture. 

Salesforce Shield Features

Salesforce shield features include a suite of tools for Event Monitoring, Platform Encryption, and Field Audit Trail. To know about each feature, here is a comprehensive overview of each tool.

1. Platform Encryption 

Salesforce Shield platform encryption enables you to set policies to safeguard your most sensitive data at rest while maintaining regulatory compliance. This will add an extra layer of security to sensitive or proprietary data. You get full control over encryption keys and set permissions to protect data from unauthorized access.

Shield encryption Salesforce provides you with the flexibility to bring your own keys (BYOK) and store keys outside Salesforce. You can even encrypt Salesforce Data Cloud data with these keys. It also gives you access to rotate, view, and edit encryption keys, providing more security and control over your sensitive data.

2. Event Monitoring 

This feature of Shield allows users to track and audit the behavior of performance, security, and usage data on all the salesforce apps. This gives you access to 54 API-accessible events including API calls, logins/logouts, page loads, report exports, Apex executions, and user interactions. 

With Salesforce Shield event monitoring, you can check who can access the sensitive data. It helps to understand user adoption across different apps so businesses can optimize performance to deliver the best end-user experience. 

3. Field Audit Trails 

Salesforce Shield Field Audit Trail enables history tracking of the specific fields you choose and aligns with your business needs. This tool provided an audit log to view the changes history of the tracked field including when and what changes were made with who made the changes. It helps to roll back accidental data changes.

4. Einstein Data Detect 

Einstein Data Detect helps to identify, find, and quickly organize sensitive data. It uses pattern matching to easily classify sensitive information like credit card details, email addresses, IPs, social security numbers, and URLs in your salesforce org. 

Data Detect provides insights to help you gain in-depth expertise in your data governance posture. Also, pattern matching provides you with a granular view of types of information, enabling you to take action and clean up useful records for improved compliance.

Key Benefits of Salesforce Shield

Using Shield Salesforce enables enterprises to protect and monitor sensitive data. Also, the suite of tools provides various benefits including:

• Extra Layer of Security

Salesforce shield features protect your sensitive data with an extra level of security and protection beyond what all users already get into the platform. This helps businesses stay ahead of evolving compliance and saves staggering costs. 

• Restricts Unauthorized Activity

Businesses get real-time security updates with the Salesforce event monitoring shield. It will help them to prevent unwanted or unlawful activity and take security measures promptly. 

• Organize Sensitive Data Quickly

With the Einstein Data Detect feature, enterprises can scan and organize sensitive data in a few clicks. This helps to align data according to sensitivity levels. Hence, this tool enables businesses to not rely on third-party services to store data outside the platform. 

• Improved Compliance

You can increase your control over data with increased industry regulations compliance with Einstein Data Detect and Field Audit Trail. It even helps users to make data entry mistakes and protect the customer information to maintain trust. 

Shield Data Detect allows you to find places that are not properly classified and have risks of exposing sensitive data. So, you can gain an understanding of this tool and easily comply with industry standards. 

These are the pros of Salesforce shield features that businesses can leverage. But it also has some limitations. 

Salesforce Shield Limitations

Shield platform is a security solution but it does not come without limitations. Here are some tradeoffs:

• Pricing Model

You have to pay an additional Salesforce Shield cost on top of your Salesforce subscription. As the budget is a barrier for small organizations, extra charges may cause enterprises to step back. For Salesforce Developer Edition, you can avail Shield at no charge. Otherwise, you have to purchase Shield in Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited Editions as an add-on subscription.

• Limited Encryption and App Support

Shield does not support all types of data to be encrypted. Some standard fields and data such as attachments can not be encrypted. Also, all encrypted data should not be available for a few Salesforce features. 

There are only certain Salesforce apps and their features work as expected in Shield and other apps do not support after Salesforce Shield encryption. 

• Implementation Complexity

Businesses may face setup challenges while Implementing Salesforce Shield because it requires technical expertise. Also, it may affect existing integration and require testing and modification. Thus, Salesforce implementation services can be valuable to leverage the potential of Shield. 

Now that you know the limitations and shield pros, you must be wondering how much does salesforce shield costs.

Salesforce Shield Pricing

Salesforce shield pricing depends on the individual needs of every customer. Its cost is calculated as a percentage of business users’ net spend on other Salesforce products. It provides enterprises with a 30-day free trial to decide which product they need.

How to Enable Salesforce Shield in 3 Simple Steps?

Enabling Salesforce Shield is something most users often struggle to do. In the Developer Edition, shield Platform is automatically available and enabled. But for the rest of Salesforce org, here are the simple ways to implement Shield easily.

Step 1: Provision your license by contacting Salesforce and getting one. 

Step 2: You must customize the application and manage the encryption key permissions by creating custom permission sets from Quick Find. 

Step 3: After getting the license and permission set up, you have to enable Shield Platform encryption on org, then create tenant secrets, and customize encryption settings.

By following these three simple steps, you can enable Shield in Salesforce.

Conclusion

Salesforce Shield can help overcome increasing cybersecurity threats and harness the capabilities of AI. This suite of tools is built to meet changing data privacy regulations needs while monitoring security threats. Hence, Salesforce businesses who want to leverage AI capabilities but are afraid of increasing data theft and attacks, Shield can help resolve all issues and ease sensitive data classification.

If you want to leverage the capabilities of AI by strengthening data security and compliance, we at Cyntexa offer you industry experts in Salesforce consulting services. We will help you throughout the process and add an extra layer of security to protect your sensitive data.