Are you aware of the risks lurking within your Salesforce integrations? As an Operations leader, your responsibility is not only to oversee, but also to safeguard the integrity of your Salesforce ecosystem. Unmonitored integrations can become the ‘Achilles’ heel’ of your data security, leading to potential misconfigurations and compliance slip-ups that could cost your organization data breaches and lost trust. In fact, Gartner points out that by 2025, 99% of data leaks will be due to preventable misconfigurations or user errors.
By now, the team at Salesforce has likely reached out to you or your colleagues to pitch Salesforce Shield – their solution for keeping business-sensitive data safe. But many in the ecosystem are still scratching their heads at ways to operationalize data, especially when it comes to extending protection beyond just Salesforce. That’s why we’re offering some creative suggestions for deploying Shield’s Event Monitoring feature to better manage your Salesforce integrations and help you justify the investment from your security team.
What is Salesforce Shield’s Event Monitoring Feature?
Salesforce Shield’s Event Monitoring feature is a robust tool that offers detailed insights into user actions within your Salesforce environment. Essentially, Event Monitoring allows Ops and IT leaders to monitor and observe various events happening throughout the Salesforce platform. This includes tracking login attempts, report access, data exports, and modifications to records or settings.
Who Finds Salesforce Event Monitoring Valuable?
Event Monitoring offers numerous benefits to various teams across your organization. It can increase your team’s capacity to uphold security, ensure compliance, improve operational efficiency, and preserve system integrity. Here’s who really gains value from access to it:
- Operations (Ops) teams: Event Monitoring helps the Ops teams monitor end-user access and spot suspicious activities that may indicate the need for changes to user permissions.
- IT and Business Systems owners: This team uses Event Monitoring to monitor third-party API activity and changes to system mappings that may result in misconfigurations.
- Information Security (InfoSec) and data governance teams: Event Monitoring is crucial for the InfoSec and data governance teams to investigate data security threats including unauthorized access and downloads. Satisfy compliance requirements with Event Monitoring’s access audit logs.
Benefits of Event Monitoring
Included as part of your Salesforce Shield investment, Event Monitoring can single-handedly warrant a positive ROI for your organization if used correctly. The benefits can be felt across Operations, IT, and Security professionals in several key areas.
1. Safeguarding Salesforce Security
Event Monitoring helps your team proactively secure your Salesforce environment by tracking login events, access to reports, and even exports attempts to sensitive data throughout your integrations. This allows for the immediate identification and mitigation of unauthorized or suspicious activity, which is crucial for preventing security breaches.
2. Ensuring Compliance Within Your Org
By providing a detailed record of user activities, Event Monitoring supports your compliance initiatives. It offers comprehensive audit trails that help your team maintain adherence to industry regulations and standards, documenting precisely who accessed which data and when.
3. Optimizing Performance
Analyzing changes to the configuration of integrated Salesforce applications can reveal opportunities for system and process improvements. By monitoring these changes, teams can identify and address performance bottlenecks, leading to more efficient workflows and enhanced system responsiveness.
4. Boosting User Adoption and Engagement
Event Monitoring allows you to examine user engagement across Salesforce, identifying segments where adoption may be weak. Insights gained from this can be used to target areas requiring extra training or support, maximizing the return on your Salesforce investment.
5. Accessing and Utilizing Event Data
The data from Event Monitoring can be accessed through various means, including API for custom analytics or integration with external monitoring tools. Salesforce also offers built-in reporting and dashboard features, providing a versatile set of tools to ensure your Salesforce setup is secure, compliant, efficient, and effectively managed.
What Baseline Reporting is Available With Event Monitoring?
With the purchase of Event Monitoring, Salesforce provides a selection of limited reports available through Analytics Studio. Out-of-the-box dashboards are available for monitoring user logins and page views, as well as lightning adoption and performance. These reports and additional views into event activity specific to your Salesforce integrations can be created and customized, but you’ll need dedicated in-house expertise to write, manage, and refresh these data queries on a regular basis.
How to Manage Salesforce Integrations With Event Monitoring
As powerful as Event Monitoring is, its current UX/UI can make it difficult to conceptualize next steps after making the investment in it. Sonar Pulse is quickly becoming the go-to tool for filling these gaps, helping Ops and IT leaders enhance their integration management by better leveraging their event monitoring logs.
Whether you’re building this out from scratch in Analytics Studio or leveraging an enhanced event monitoring tool like Sonar, here are four creative ways you can improve the management of your Salesforce integrations.
1. Spot Newly Connected Integrations
By systematically reviewing event logs, you gain visibility into which users and third-party applications have recently gained access to Salesforce data. Event logs capture every instance of access, including new API connections established by integrations such as Salesloft, HubSpot, or other tools. This allows IT and Operations teams to quickly identify unauthorized access or validate new integrations, ensuring they align with security protocols and access policies.
Regular audits of these logs help maintain an up-to-date understanding of who is accessing your data and for what purpose, which is crucial for maintaining data integrity and security.
2. Detect Field and Object Level Configuration Changes
Event Monitoring is essential for Operations teams to track changes to field-level mappings and configurations made by other teams or through third-party tools. Whether changes occur in CRM platforms like HubSpot or Salesloft, an event monitoring tool can organize logs with a timestamp, documenting what was changed, by whom, and when.
This capability enables Ops teams to be the first to know about such updates, allowing for quick responses to potential disruptions or errors introduced by these changes. It also helps to maintain the consistency and accuracy of data across different systems, which is crucial for operational efficiency and data reliability.
3. Monitor API Calls
Salesforce provides a daily API limit at the organizational level, but it doesn’t specify which integrations are consuming these API calls. With enhanced Event Monitoring logs, you can pinpoint exactly which third-party integration is making specific API calls.
This granular insight allows IT and Ops teams to manage and optimize API usage more effectively, ensuring that no single integration disproportionately consumes resources that could impact overall system performance. It also aids in troubleshooting and resolving issues related to API overuse before they lead to system slowdowns or outages.
4. Expedite Delivery of Audit Logs for Information Security
When security teams require access logs to satisfy compliance requirements for frameworks like HIPAA, ISO 27001, or PCI, Event Monitoring logs are a crucial resource. These logs provide detailed and actionable information about user activities, including data access and modifications.
By joining and filtering event audit logs, teams are able to review the specific users and fields being accessed, including those containing personally identifiable information (PII). This allows InfoSec teams to quickly identify potential compliance issues or breaches of data handling standards.
Summary
While Salesforce Shield’s Event Monitoring offers valuable insights into user activities and system interactions, it also presents significant gaps that IT and Ops teams should be aware of. The tool primarily delivers raw data without context or actionable insights, leading to challenges in integration monitoring, reactive data loss prevention, inadequate resource management, and absence of data lineage management. These limitations can hinder the tool’s effectiveness in providing comprehensive security, performance, and compliance oversight.
Teams should consider enhancing capabilities with solutions like Sonar Pulse to address these gaps and maximize their Salesforce Shield investment. Don’t let your Salesforce integrations become a vulnerability – empower your team with the knowledge they need to stay ahead of threats and protect your data. Try Sonar Pulse today!