As valuable as SaaS applications have become, there are some overlooked and somewhat alarming ramifications to security. The growth of SaaS has resulted in a dramatic increase in the volume, variety, and velocity of SaaS data CISOs need to manage and secure.
The digitization of business processes is flooding organizations with a greater volume of data than ever before, all of which has a variety of sensitivity levels ranging from public to highly confidential. At the same time, the velocity with which data is created is increasing at exponential rates--making it nearly impossible for those in charge of managing this data to keep up.
Salesforce data in highly regulated industries such as healthcare, finance, and pharma is often especially valuable — to organizations and customers, but also to bad actors who could enjoy lucrative paydays if they managed to access it. Keeping that data safe often means defending against some of the most sophisticated attacks possible and preventing security gaps that allow small oversights to blossom into big vulnerabilities.
Legislative compliance frameworks such as HIPAA, the Gramm-Leach Bliley Act, HITRUST, HRSA, and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act each contain a variety of regulatory drivers that auditors will assess as they validate the configuration and alignment of your Salesforce instance. Cloud security posture management is required to reduce the risks of the current “trust-me” environment and Excel-based oversight models.
If your organization consists of a variety of teams using the platform independently of one another with no codified companywide protocol for sharing data, then blind spots are exactly what you’ll have. Even if you’re disciplined about protecting data, changes to the platform or to industry regulations that govern its use will require CISOs to stay vigilant about following best practices.
In financial services, Salesforce is becoming a vital component of loan origination. On the healthcare side, electronic protected health information (ePHI) is increasingly being kept in Salesforce.
