Data classification in Salesforce offers a strong security foundation, providing you a high-level picture of what’s in your Org and where IT resources should be allocated. In addition, a well-thought-out data classification system makes it simple to locate and retrieve critical information, which is especially important for legal discovery, risk management, and compliance.
So, what exactly does data categorization entail? It’s just the act of categorizing your data into distinct groups based on its level of sensitivity. Each category has a corresponding effect level and suggested security/access procedure; for example, anybody may see public data, but it requires safeguards to prevent unauthorized alteration. On the other hand, you must safeguard sensitive or confidential data more stringently, mainly if HIPAA or GDPR rules apply. The main types of salesforce data classification are compliance categorization, field usage, data owner, and data sensitivity level.
Enterprises can establish compelling and accurate controls to secure data by identifying where they have kept different data types. So, here are some benefits of Salesforce data classification that you must know about before you hire Salesforce consultant.
Offers Access and Confidentiality
Your company holds a great deal of sensitive data about your customers, prospects, and business; if the access controls for that data are wrong, outdated, or poorly understood, it’s a prominent cause of danger.
The access controls in Salesforce are complicated. However, even the best-designed access restrictions need a thorough awareness of where sensitive data is kept. Once you know this, assigning views, modifying, and deleting access to relevant users becomes easy.
Sensitive data can be classified as follows:
- Public– Anyone can view it but cannot alter the information.
- Internal– It is only available to the contractors and employees and cannot be shared publicly. However, you can share it with partners or customers under the NDA or Non-Disclosure Agreement.
- Confidential– It is only available to an approved group of contractors and employees, but any regulation, law, or master service agreement (MSA) has not restricted it. Also, you can share it with partners or customers under the NDA.
- Restricted– Restricted data is available only to an approved group of contractors and employees and is likely restricted by regulation, law, MSA, or an NDA.
- Mission critical– These data are available only to a small group of approved contractors and employees. If third parties access these data, they can be subject to the heightened contractual requirement and always restricted by the law and regulation.
Provides Data Security and Reduced Legal Risks
Each outdated record has a multiplier impact when duplicated across the sandboxes and other settings. Reducing outdated data pays off similarly with a multiplier impact.
Save money on the ‘obsolete data tax,’ which affects your organization’s storage, data security, masking, archiving, and backups? In addition, limiting data in production reduces the complexity of the organization since there are fewer data-related business and technical concerns to deal with.
Many privacy regulations demand data minimization and retention, which result in the reduction of outdated data.
Protect your company from penalties and disgrace resulting from unintentional emails and other outreach to persons whose data your company does not have a legal basis to store. Keeping the Salesforce org compliant means that downstream systems like Pardot, Marketing Cloud, Marketo, Mailchimp, and Eloqua cannot store or process the old data.
Gives Increased Visibility and Field Usage
Data classification usually makes the system’s data more accessible and straightforward to understand and locate, saving time and money. This means more precise reporting and more immediate insights into your company and customers.
Building and executing a data classification strategy takes time, and there’s no denying it. However, it’s a one-time investment that will result in more productivity, fewer risks, and less time spent on big-picture objectives like security and compliance.
The Field Usage categorization keeps track of whether or not the field is in use, which is essential for cleaning up.
These categories include:
- Depreciate candidate – Planned initially for depreciation, which is not used anymore.
- Active – This category is in use and visible.
- Hidden – It is visible, and you can use it for the depreciation with caution.
Regularly cleaning unwanted modifications is critical for user adoption and overall Org performance. In addition, you may use this field to identify possible deprecation candidates. If you check the data owner categorization, you’ll know who to contact next, allowing you to streamline your Org.
You can also get a collection of tools and a suggested cycle for Org cleaning that is safe and effective. In addition to this, a salesforce consultant can help you find idle customizations and other depreciation candidates, run the impact analysis, and route approvals to the relevant authority. This, you can do, with or without enabling data categorization.
Regulatory Compliance
Susceptible data is subjected to regulatory inspection, and here’s where the Compliance Categorization field paves the way to identify the data using specialized privacy requirements. It also requires additional security controls.
Following compliance rules, organizations can secure specific data, such as cardholder information (PCI DSS) or EU citizens’ data (GDPR). Data categorization allows you to identify data subject to specific rules, allowing you to implement the necessary controls and pass audits.
Here are some examples of how data classification might assist you in meeting common compliance standards:
- GDPR — This stands for General Data Protection Regulation. Data categorization enables you to uphold data subjects’ rights, such as meeting data subject access requests by accessing a group of documents containing information about a certain person.
- HIPAA — Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Acts help you to know where you have kept all of your health records and might help you put security safeguards to keep them safe.
- ISO 27001 — You can fulfill the standards for avoiding unauthorized disclosure or alteration by classifying information according to its value and sensitivity.
- NIST SP 800-53 — National Institute of Standards and Technology- Special Publication helps categorize the data and helps the federal agencies architect and manage all their IT systems properly.
- PCI DSS — Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard Salesforce data classification helps you identify and safeguard the financial information used in the payment card.
Conclusion
Because most organizations wish to build their own data classification model, having the efficiency of Salesforce data classification could become the perfect foundation for your company. This strategy does more than improve data organization and becomes an invaluable component of your company’s security strategy.
