Town of Cary Balances Scalable Development with Data Security on the Salesforce Platform.

The Town of Cary, NC, is a fast-growing town in the Research Triangle, known for its high quality of life, strong tech presence, and vibrant community, home to companies like SAS and Epic Games.

For the Town of Cary, Salesforce is a foundational platform for consolidating citizen data, improving services, and managing relationships with local businesses and contractors. 

The Town of Cary relies on Salesforce for its CRM, 311 center, and land development operations. By unifying data on a single platform, the town’s 1,800 Salesforce users have a complete 360-degree view of citizens. “Everyone can use the same contact and account record to tie their services against,” explains Kevin Hales, the Town of Cary’s Innovation Lab Platform Development Coordinator. This helps resolve citizen inquiries faster and enables highly personalized service delivery.

Moreover, Salesforce acts as a crucial foundation for digital innovation. The Town of Cary team has built custom Salesforce apps, including a project and services catalog and new 311 tools to streamline service reporting and inspections. What began as a move away from paper processes has grown into a robust, data-driven ecosystem with the Salesforce Platform at its core.

Salesforce has become the heart of the Town of Cary’s data-driven services. Without it, the municipality would struggle to meet the town’s expectations and drive citizen engagement. Recognizing the critical importance of data to its daily operations, Cary has made proactive efforts to reinforce data resilience, streamline secure development, and improve system governance.

That’s where Salesforce’s Trusted Services comes into play.

Reinforcing data resilience with Backup & Recover

To safeguard critical citizen data and stay ahead of an increasingly treacherous cyber threat landscape, the Town of Cary sought a reliable backup and recovery solution.‍

“We’re custodians of a lot of public records, and to have all of that go away and lose decades of permitting and infrastructure is a very scary thought. All of this information is necessary to provide citizen services. So having our data secured somewhere is great peace of mind,” Kevin says.

With the help of Backup & Recover’s automated features like Smart Alerts, which flag significant changes to sensitive objects, and Data Compare, which pinpoints exactly what has been added, deleted or changed between backups, the Town of Cary no longer has to rely on manual processes or guesswork.

These tools offer a level of precision and speed that would be difficult to achieve with internal resources alone. Now, instead of spending time tracking down changes or worrying about data integrity, the team can act quickly and confidently, knowing they can retrieve citizens’ data if the unexpected happens. It is not just about having a backup; it is about having intelligent, automated protection that helps safeguard public trust.

Streamlining secure development with Data Mask & Seed

In order to support ongoing development projects on Salesforce, the Town of Cary also needed to enhance the overall quality of their testing capabilities in order to drive further innovation. They adoption Data Mask & Seed in order to streamline the process to seed their Sandbox environments with test data, and to ensure that data stays safe and secure. 

“Sandbox seeding and masking was super attractive to us because we’re constantly working between our contractors and admin team,” Kevin explains. “We’re constantly spinning up new sandboxes and trying to seed them with data so that we can test that our new developments are working correctly. Since we’re often dealing with sensitive data too, masking is really important so that our external contractors only have access to the data that the need to see.”

Better still, the feature is highly intuitive. Seeding templates can be built in just a few clicks, which is a key selling point for the Town of Cary — especially considering they don’t have any dedicated Salesforce admins in the town. These capabilities allow them to expedite their development process while ensuring data compliance across teams and across dozens of active Sandbox environments. 

Improving system governance with Security Center

Taking data protection a step further, the team also enforces strict permission controls and clearly classifies sensitive data to ensure it’s only accessible to the right people. In the public sector, defining and managing sensitive personal information is a tricky balancing act because the line between what is and isn’t sensitive is inherently blurred.

“Most of our data is ingested from public sources,” says Kevin. “It may be classified as ‘PII insecure,’ but it’s already out there and publicly available. Things like constituent names, addresses, and other basic identifying information. So, even though it’s public, we still treat it with care, because it’s tied to real people and how we serve them.”

With Security Center, Kevin's team can clearly understand current data access, simplifying the process of identifying and adjusting permissions to achieve least privilege. This allows them to ensure contractors see only relevant information and grant users only the necessary permissions for their function. Security Center provides the tools needed to fine-tune these controls and effectively clean up eight years of complex and redundant permission settings. It allows them to understand and address potential over-permissioning and better adhere to the principle of least-privilege access, ultimately reducing the potential for data exposure.

Additionally, with a shift from Profiles to Permission Sets on the horizon, the team needed deeper insight into permission configurations to manage the transition smoothly. Gaining clarity into hidden or redundant permissions was a critical step in ensuring compliance, reducing risk, and simplifying administration.

With a centralized, easily managed repository of citizen data built on the Salesforce Platform, the Town of Cary and its contractors can streamline existing services and develop new, innovative programs. With Salesforce’s Trusted Services in its tool belt, the Town of Cary can continue to test data, build new programs, and deliver stellar experiences — all without the fear of irreparable data breaches and citizen distrust.