Importance of Regular Security Audits in Salesforce: How to Identify and Address Vulnerabilities

Every now and then, you can hear cases of cyberattacks, resulting in huge losses for the companies. As per the IBM/Ponemon report, the cost of data breaches reached USD 4.35 million in 2022. Most data leaks expose sensitive information like credit card details, email addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers, and so on. Data breaches not only lead to monetary losses but also hamper the trust of customers and leads. Therefore, it becomes imperative to prevent these scenarios, and here, regular security audits help a lot. 

Today, many organizations rely on Salesforce for most of their needs, and to ensure the best protection of data, performing audits is a must. But what is auditing, and how can it benefit your organization? Get all the answers to your questions below.

What is a Salesforce Security Audit and Do You Need One?

Salesforce is known for streamlining and boosting the sales efforts of businesses. However, the complexity of Salesforce is also high, so there might be a lot of security gaps. These gaps and potential vulnerabilities may create havoc if not taken care of immediately. So, you need to perform security audits that can review your entire system and find areas for improvement as well as issues.

Audits provide insights into system usage and allow for the identification of any unexpected changes or trends. In Salesforce, you can perform audits through:

• Record Modification Fields: Here you can find out the user’s name and who made changes to the record.
• Setup Audit Trail: Admins can learn about all configuration changes by viewing a Setup Audit Trail.
• Tracking Individual Fields: You can enable individual field auditing and automatically track modifications made to the particular fields.
• Reviewing Login History: Learn about the successful and unsuccessful attempts at login by monitoring the history on a regular basis.

Even if you have a brief idea about auditing, you might still be confused about whether to go for it or not. Here are certain scenarios in which you should definitely opt for audits to evaluate your Salesforce Org’s health.

• If your system has not been reviewed for security issues in more than 6 months.
• If your Salesforce now does not align with the company’s objectives.
• If you perform frequent Salesforce releases, adding new code and customizations.
• If the amount of data in your CRM is increasing day by day.
• If you are unsure about the security setup and protections in place.

Benefits of Performing Regular Salesforce Security Audits

All platforms need maintenance and regular checks to perform at their best, and Salesforce is no exception. Here are some more reasons why you should consider auditing and how it ensures the safety and efficiency of Salesforce:

1. Removing the Clutter:

When it comes to efficiency, Salesforce works amazingly for enterprises. However, the presence of excess files can make the platform more complex and take up your valuable time when you search for something. While performing security audits, make sure that you remove any duplicate files, which consume a lot of space, and try to keep them organized.

2. Protection of Data: 

Sometimes you may have to grant access to several administrators to complete a task. But it is extremely important to have control over permissions in order to protect your data. With regular security audits, you can learn who has access and whether their role needs it or not. You can also analyse the login attempts that have happened over the last few months and prevent any potential data abuse.

3. Diagnosing Potential Risks:

When users log in to the system, you can learn about their devices and even track their location. This will help you identify any potential security risk attached to any unusual occurrence. For example, if an employee logs in remotely after hours, and that is not typical for their job,  there may be a risk of data breach. With audits, you can find out about such red flags and eliminate the risk on time.

4. Optimize System’s Capabilities:

By analysing the system and its configuration, it is easy to spot the best performers. Auditing allows you to know whether the Salesforce platform is operating correctly or if it needs any updates. Moreover, you can learn whether your Salesforce still aligns with business initiatives or not.

Top Ways to Monitor Vulnerabilities and Maintain Data Security in Salesforce

Are you concerned about the security setup of the Salesforce platform or finding it inefficient? The reason could be vulnerabilities. Data security should be the top priority for any organization and to keep it perfectly fine, you need to follow these easy ways.

1. Salesforce Health Check: 

The Health Check offers you visibility into your Salesforce Org security settings and helps identify vulnerabilities in them. The tool analyses and gives a score on the basis of security issues. It shows high, medium, and low risk and informational security settings, from which you can learn which setting has critical status and needs immediate action.

2. Check for Duplicate Records: 

In order to maintain the data hygiene of your platform, you have to conduct reports on duplicate files in your system. After that, try to remove those duplicate files using a de-duplication strategy.

3. API Usage Notifications: 

Setting up a threshold for API usage is highly essential. It ensures that no lost data syncs or outages happen when Salesforce is connected to third-party apps. With API usage notification, the user immediately gets an email when the API requests exceed the limit within a certain time period. This is critical because if you max out your Salesforce API limits, all of your API integrations could be blocked for up to 24 hours. 

4. Manual Org Evaluation: 

Some may not prefer tools and like to perform a manual Org evaluation. For preparing a manual assessment report, begin by sorting important settings that need assessment, like license usage, data storage, custom settings, batch classes, etc. After that, categorize those issues that are of high priority and make fixes. However, it is always best to go for a tool that does a complete assessment without any hassle or errors.

5. Apex Exception Emails: 

If your system is losing efficiency due to technical debt, then it’s high time to enable apex exception emails. When monitored on a regular basis, you will receive an email regarding unhandled exceptions in a trigger. It also alerts you whenever the Apex governor limit crosses over 50 percent.

6. Virus Scanning: 

Files that are uploaded to Salesforce do not go through virus scanning, making it one of the biggest threats. Investing in a virus scanner is the best way to mitigate such risks. Cybersecurity solutions like EzProtect help safeguard Salesforce and other connected SaaS platforms from ransomware, malware, viruses, and other attacks.

7. Event Monitoring: 

Get complete visibility of individual events and monitor trends to find out any unusual behaviour. If you spot any vulnerability or issue, then immediately resolve the problem and protect your Org data.

8. Setting IP Ranges: 

In present times, employees log in to the system from various locations, which raises data threat concerns. The solution to this issue is to set up IP ranges and monitor which IP addresses are suspicious. To allow trusted IP ranges only, go to Setup and click on Security. After that, you will find Network Access, and then you can custom range the addresses.

9. Enable Session Timeouts:

If your staff often leaves their computers open while going for lunch or meetings, it might be a huge security risk. Therefore, enable session timeout after certain hours and reduce the potential risks.

Wrapping Up

Auditing is the pathway to keep Salesforce Org safe and maximize the system’s efficiency. There are numerous tools available on the market that check the platform for any bugs or issues. Using the above-mentioned methods, you can identify whether the current utilization offers enough security or not and what you can do to prevent vulnerabilities. By following the best practices, you ensure your system maintains the necessary security standards and remains a highly valuable platform.

Concerned about the security of your Salesforce data? Let us help. Sign-up for a free security assessment of your Salesforce org to find out if you are at risk today.