Secure 360: Holistically Secure Your Salesforce Org & Data

Salesforce gives you three built-in tools at no cost: Health Check (overall org security posture), Portal Health Check (Experience Cloud / community object exposure), and Salesforce Optimizer (performance and security audit). Run all three before evaluating any paid solution — they surface the majority of common misconfigurations and give you a prioritized action list.

Only in a narrow scenario. Shield Platform Encryption protects data at the database layer — meaning if someone somehow accessed Salesforce’s underlying infrastructure, they would only see encrypted data. But if a user or integration has valid Salesforce credentials, they see the data regardless of Shield. Shield does not protect against credential theft, over-broad access profiles, or insider threats. Event Monitoring and Enhanced Transaction Security Policy are the Shield features that actually help with most real-world breach scenarios.

More than most people realize. Full and partial copy sandboxes replicate all production records including PII, PHI, and financial data. Developer and Developer Pro sandboxes do not include transactional data, but they do contain all user records — meaning every email address, phone number, job title, and SSO federation ID for your entire user population. These sandboxes are often shared freely, so the only thing protecting that data is good faith and NDAs.

OpenAI’s own terms confirm that conversations can be reviewed by OpenAI staff and may be used to train future models. For healthcare, financial services, and other regulated industries this creates real compliance exposure every time an employee pastes case notes, contact details, or policy numbers into a chat prompt. Blocking ChatGPT entirely is impractical as teams work remotely across unmanaged devices. The practical solution is to anonymize PII before it leaves the Salesforce perimeter and restore it in the response.

Immediately after every sandbox refresh — not as an afterthought. For new implementations loading data via ETL, mask before opening access to the team. For existing orgs in regulated industries, the regulatory burden and reputational risk of a test email reaching a real customer makes masking non-negotiable. For DevOps-mature teams, masking should be automated in the refresh pipeline so no manual step is required and access is gated on completion.

Event Monitoring is the most broadly useful Shield feature for organizations concerned about data exfiltration or unauthorized activity. It provides near-real-time tracking of logins, report exports, community page visits, and other events — enabling proactive detection rather than after-the-fact forensics. Enhanced Transaction Security Policy extends this by letting you block suspicious actions in real time, such as a user attempting to export a report containing more than 100 SSNs.