Salesforce Data Security: The Role of Effective Data Classification

As a Security Architect at Salesforce in ANZ, I engage with customers across different industries, sizes, and regulatory obligations. A common challenge I hear from security stakeholders is how to strengthen their data security, risk, and compliance approach.

This is a critical area, as the latest State of IT Security report shows that 68% of security leaders find compliance more difficult due to the swiftly changing regulatory landscape. When compliance becomes this complex, you need a strong foundation. This is why effective data classification is a crucial starting point for getting your data governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) under control.

In this article, we’ll examine how a well-defined and implemented data classification strategy can support your data governance, help mitigate risks, and improve adherence to security controls. We’ll also cover how the Salesforce Security Centre with its Data Classification feature works alongside other Salesforce security tools to elevate your security posture.

Defining Data Classification in Salesforce

Data classification is the process of precisely labelling every Salesforce field (standard or custom) with critical metadata. This is the information security and GRC teams need to enforce the correct security controls and data management policies.

Every field can be defined with attributes, ensuring no information is overlooked:

• Data Sensitivity Level: (e.g., Public, Internal, Confidential)
• Compliance Category: (e.g., PII, PCI, HIPAA)
• Other Contextual Data: Such as field ownership and usage.

While Salesforce provides default compliance categories and sensitivity levels for our customers to use, all classifications can be fully customised to support your organisation’s specific GRC requirements.

Automated Data Classification at Scale with Salesforce Security Center

If you’ve been using Salesforce for some time, you know that classifying data manually at scale is a significant challenge. Factors like human error, time-to-execute, and the sheer effort required for bulk input often make the manual path impractical. Classification is, however, essential for identifying exactly where sensitive information resides in Salesforce, helping you understand the associated risk profile.

To address this, Salesforce offers a fully automated solution. With the Salesforce Security Centre, our customers use the Data Classification tool to discover precisely where sensitive information resides and categorise it correctly for compliance and sensitivity, directly into the field.

This is all managed in one efficient view, offering search, filtering, and bulk selection features. The Security Centre also includes pre-built classification templates and an easy-to-use wizard that follows best practices, making it easy to identify common field types like public, system, and high-risk fields.

Furthermore, the Advanced Filtering capability allows you to focus on unclassified data with surgical precision. You can filter based on managed packages, field usage, field types, data types, existing sensitivity levels, or custom keywords and API names. Once you’ve pinpointed the fields, you can classify them in bulk with a single click. This is crucial for understanding the risk and compliance impact of your data and enforcing the principle of least-privileged access, a key step in securing Salesforce data.

Data Classification: Enabling Your End-to-End Security Strategy

Classification is the essential enabler for your complete Salesforce security strategy. Native security solutions like Data Mask, Privacy Centre, and Transaction Security Policies rely on this classified data to protect information across the entire data lifecycle.

Once classified, this data is leveraged by key Salesforce security tools:

• Protecting Sandboxes with Data Mask: Create data security policies to automatically mask sensitive information (based on its classification) when copying records from Production to Sandbox environments, protecting your low-level testing systems.
• Proactive Threat Detection with Transaction Security Policies: With this proactive control, you can define policies that can block the export of sensitive data (like PII) in real-time using a custom Apex class, based on the field’s classification.
• Simplifying Data Privacy with Privacy Centre: By leveraging data classification, Privacy Centre allows you to build and enforce critical data management policies. This includes Data Retention, Right to Be Forgotten (RTBF), and Data Subject Access Request (DSAR), helping you fulfil data privacy regulations and build customer trust.

Conclusion: Data Classification as a Strategic Business Enabler

Data classification is fundamental to understanding the data your business stores and processes. It provides immediate, actionable insights into sensitivity levels, compliance categories, and descriptive details such as data type and ownership.

With Salesforce Security Centre’s Data Classification feature, customers can take an effective, automated approach to classify data within their Salesforce instance. This information not only helps you protect and control data use but also effectively informs and enables other data security solutions implemented across your Salesforce organisation, taking your security to the next level.

Ready to Build Your Data Security Foundation?

Start your journey toward a stronger security posture by reviewing the findings in the State of IT Security Report and exploring the capabilities of the Salesforce Security Centre today.