Salesforce Shield: Everything You Need to Know

Organizations want extra security and compliance requirements to protect their data from unauthorized access and modification. Here comes the Salesforce Shield, where every organization has heard of or brought it or needs help figuring out what to do with it. This blog gives you all the information about the Salesforce Shield that you need for the organization.

What is Salesforce Shield?

Salesforce Shield is a robust security suite designed to safeguard sensitive data within Salesforce environments. By providing additional layers of protection, such as data encryption, event monitoring, and audit trails, Salesforce Shield complements the shared responsibility model and helps organizations meet compliance and security standards.

Whether you’re a small business or a large enterprise, Salesforce Shield offers the extra protection you need to ensure your data remains secure.

Components of Salesforce Shield

The 4 main components of the Salesforce Shield and each of them can be licensed or purchased under one go:

1. Platform encryption 
2. Field Audit Trail 
3. Event Monitoring 
4. Einstein Data Detect 

• Platform Encryption: It allows you to natively encrypt data at rest at field level and for your files and attachments so that data is protected at rest. It has the highest level of encryption within Salesforce with 256 bits, and it is encrypted at rest. 
• Field Audit Trail: It allows you to extend your history tracking for up to 10 years. The field audit trail can retain the field history from a business perspective.
• Event Monitoring: It is user activity monitoring, which is only available in Salesforce Shield. You see what your users are doing within the system. With this event monitoring, you can monitor, prevent, and mitigate threats in the system.
• Einstein Data Detect: It will scan the sensitive data, like a credit card number or email address, and tell you where that is present in Salesforce.org.

Shield platform encryption

Shield platform encryption, which encrypts the data and stores it as the ciphertext. It converts plain text into ciphertext so that data is encrypted at rest. It makes sure that your access field-level security is controlled with the native field-level security. Because of this, platform encryption is mostly transparent to end users, which means that it is not going to mask the data  or obscure it in Salesforce.

In platform encryption, data is encrypted at the field level, whereas files and attachments are either encrypted or not at all at the org level. If you have the problem with the encryption, the Salesforce team will always help you with that.

Types of platform encryption methods

There are two types of platform encryption methods, which are:

• Probabilistic encryption: It is the original form of encryption that came out a few years ago, and it is the most secure form because it has a fully randomized initialization vector. It is fully randomized, and the starting variable is more secure. 
• Deterministic encryption: It is also called “filter preserving.” It helps to give you the ability to maintain the filtering capabilities, which use the strongest level of encryption with 256 bits AES (an advanced encryption standard). It has a static initialization vector, which allows you to match the different pieces of data together. Because of this, you can maintain some of those filtering and functionality.

How to Implement Salesforce Shield?

To implement the Salesforce Shield, you need to run “Einstein Data Detect” to detect where sensitive data will reside. If you are looking for data classification, you need a third-party solution like Own Backup Secure that can create a Wishlist of fields to encrypt and assign confidentiality values. 

The next step is to go through the impact analysis with the help of “own backup secure”. There also follow the platform encryption that consist in deciding what kind of encryption to use: the deterministic or the probabilistic one. Last modified details: Finally, do not complicate the metadata API by manually setting up Field Audit Trail polices by instead using OwnBack Secure’s interface to do it efficiently.

Next, include Event Monitoring through Transaction Security Policies. Last, use the Event Monitoring Analytics App offered by Salesforce to the test.

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