Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

What does PaaS stand for? Why is the Salesforce Platform better than other solutions? And, most of all, what is Heroku? These are the questions we hear a lot and you'll find the answers below. But if you have others, please don't hesitate to contact us — we're here to help.
Defining “enterprise cloud platform” begins with understanding cloud computing. At the most basic level, cloud computing solutions deliver data and application functionality through the web, rather than having them reside on a user’s desktop/laptop/mobile device, hardware drive, or in what are otherwise known as on-premises solutions.

As a result, IT departments no longer need to worry about buying and provisioning servers to hold company data and can instead focus on creating applications that help the business run faster. And they don’t have to worry about installing applications on every device for every user in a business. Instead, users with web access simply log on to an app to access, share, and collaborate on relevant data and business processes immediately.

Enterprise cloud platforms are specifically designed to help drive every department of a business with apps. The apps you build can scale for growth, allow for customization (by developers, IT departments, business users, or all three), and are highly secure.

Salesforce has been a leader in enterprise cloud computing since 1999, virtually creating the category. Today, Salesforce has more than 100,000 customers and continues to be a recognized leader in cloud computing for businesses of all sizes and in nearly every industry under the sun.
The Salesforce Platform brings together all the tools and services that have made us the world's #1 enterprise cloud platform. With a unified ecosystem for building, managing, buying, and optimizing apps — all built on Salesforce's trusted cloud infrastructure — CIOs, IT groups, admins, and developers are empowered with everything needed to drive results across the business by quickly building apps in any language, for any device, and managing them all in a single enterprise cloud environment. A key advantage of building apps on the Salesforce Platform is that for our existing customers, because they use our CRM, all of their business-critical and customer data is inside the Salesforce Platform already. For new customers, the Salesforce Platform provides an opportunity to unify all digital apps and process around a single source of customer intelligence and make the customer-driven digital transformation possible.
There are four basic ways a business can make apps for a company: 1) on-premises solutions, 2) infrastructure-as-a-service solutions, 3) platform-as-a-service solutions, and 4) software-as-a-service solutions.

On-premises solutions require the IT department to build the entire solution on its own, from the servers to the code database. While that means granular control of hardware, software, infrastructure, and networking, it’s expensive, time consuming, and resource-intensive. Upgrades are hard to manage and it’s not always easy to move the technology forward in pace with changing business needs.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provides raw data center capacity so that IT can take advantage of virtual machines, managed storage and networks, shared physical and network security. IaaS also means IT benefits from utility pricing that changes proportionally as you scale. However, IaaS still requires heavy IT involvement for integrating data, as well as building and maintaining apps and users.

Platform as a service (PaaS) offers everything IaaS delivers, as well the operating systems, middleware, runtime, and most importantly, highly configurable prebuilt visual development tools that allow IT and others in the business to build and deploy apps quickly, and integrate data from other sources like SAP and Oracle, and the tools and services to manage it all.

Software as a service (SaaS) delivers packaged apps that are ready to go for users with a web browser and internet access. The apps, built on a cloud database from an underlying platform, typically deliver software on a monthly subscription. Salesforce has been a leader in SaaS since 1999.

Salesforce was the first company to deliver PaaS to companies around the world, and it delivers it as few others do or can.
First, for customers using Salesforce apps like Sales Cloud, the Salesforce Platform makes it possible to bring deeply customized functions to the app for any device and any employee. So the Salesforce Platform lets you extend the power of your CRM with capabilities like Lightning App Builder, Process Builder, and more.

Second, the Salesforce Platform offers tools and solutions like Sandboxes and Salesforce DX to allow businesses to strengthen their orgs with additional security, connectivity, and easier tools for developers to test and build apps.

Companies can also use the Salesforce Platform to digitize employee experiences within the organization for any department — not just sales and service — automate business processes, and integrate data from third parties into their apps built on the platform. Employee help desk, recruitment, collaboration (intranet), and asset management are some of the most common examples of employee apps. In addition, AppExchange provides an entire ecosystem of plug-and-play apps to quickly digitize employee experiences.

Last, but not least, companies can transform their customers' experiences using products such as Heroku and IoT. Heroku, seamlessly integrated with the Salesforce Platform, lets customers build apps for their customers in any language and scale to millions of users instantly and securely. IoT provides a rules engine and orchestration to integrate and respond to the data coming from customers' connected devices in real time.
Lightning empowers your team with a unified and innovative platform to build engaging experiences on our trusted infrastructure. Lightning is comprised of the modern and responsive myLightning user experience built on our Lightning Services foundation, enabling teams to customize the Salesforce instance, build applications, and collaborate to deliver continuous innovation. Teams can also tap into the Lightning Ecosystem, our rich set of AppExchange partners who contribute to Lightning with finished applications and Lightning Components.

In short, Lightning delivers everything your team needs to build engaging experiences and work easier and faster.
Heroku Enterprise gives developers the tools they need to build apps — specifically, the development and deployment of cloud-based, external-facing, scalable apps for customers, rather than employee-facing, internal apps that Lightning helps you build.

Heroku Enterprise also allows developers to build in any programming language rather than just Apex, including Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Python, Java, and more. Heroku apps can run on any device and can link to social accounts so that customers can like, share, and take other public actions straight from the app.

Heroku Connect is a powerful bridge between Heroku Enterprise and the Salesforce Platform that creates a bidirectional sync of data between the two environments. With this link, businesses can unlock the power of customer data from their Salesforce Platform instance inside their Heroku apps.
Using Heroku and Lightning together helps companies create stronger, more lasting relationships with their customers. Companies can sync user data from Heroku with relevant internal employee apps and get an easy-to-digest view of the information in dashboards, allowing them to quickly see customer insights and take action on them.
Heroku is best for companies that want to build customer apps that use programming languages other than Apex to create scalable, global, external-facing web and mobile applications.

Salesforce Platform empowers users with both technical and non-technical backgrounds to build apps fast, automate business processes, and engage employees in communities.
Salesforce is built on a multitenant infrastructure, which means that your apps are run on a shared data center, lowering costs and reducing the need to devote resources (time, money, and people) to maintenance. The robust and flexible security architecture of the Salesforce Platform is trusted by companies around the world, including those in the most heavily regulated industries — from financial services to healthcare to government — and it provides the highest level of security and control over everything from user and client authentication through administrative permissions to the data access and sharing model, including:

Org Security: Salesforce protects your organization's data from all other customer organizations by using a unique identifier that restricts access at every level to your data from anyone outside of your company — including us.

User Security: User authentication (both delegated and SAML) combined with network-level security by IP address, session restrictions, and audit trails provide control and visibility into what users are doing in the system and their field history.

Programmatic Security: Configurable, authenticated sessions secure access to logic, data, and metadata. Salesforce even offers a source code scanner that produces a report analyzing the security of your code.

Trust and Visibility: Trust starts with transparency. Salesforce displays real-time information on system performance and security, and offers tips on best security practices for your organization. Learn more at trust.salesforce.com.
The Salesforce app is more than just a mobile version of Salesforce. Built API-first, it’s a mobile container for any business app you build on the Salesforce, including mobile-ready apps from AppExchange.
Because Salesforce is built 100% in the cloud with a unified data model and is API-first, any app built on it can be deployed instantly to the Salesforce mobile app, which is also built on Lightning. In fact, to make an app mobile-enabled only requires making sure that the Salesforce mobile app is enabled and saved in the Mobile Administration setup. Additionally, admins can control who has access to the app within an organization.
Lightning App Builder is the point-and-click integrated development environment (IDE) of the Salesforce Platform. To build apps in Lightning App Builder, developers just need to drag and drop Lightning components, some of which come out of the box. In addition, Salesforce Lightning gives developers and admins access to the same framework that delivers the Salesforce mobile app, helping them to create their own app components quickly and easily.

In addition to components, Lightning also offers tools that help developers, IT, and business users do more, quickly. These tools include: Lightning App Builder and Process Builder to create custom apps with complex business logic and beautiful user interfaces that work on any device. Lightning Connect to seamlessly and quickly integrate third-party data from sources like SAP, Oracle, MSFT, and others.
Every major consumer website uses components. When you open a normal webpage, you see the page as a complete experience. In reality, however, it is actually a set of components stitched together behind the scenes. For example, on a Yahoo page, the center news feed is one component surrounded by other components, like the ad units, sidebars, and so forth, as a framework.

Salesforce Lightning brings these same component framework concepts to the enterprise, offering a set of premade components to start. This means developers and IT now have a framework that components can easily be made on, and in turn, used to assemble apps.

Salesforce also offers developers and partners the capability to create their own components, which means businesses can compose apps with premade components from Salesforce, make their own custom components, or use components made by AppExchange partners. Salesforce Lightning tools also allow these premade components to be assembled and reassembled specifically for any screen with drag-and-drop ease. 
No. Salesforce provides easy-to-use, point-and-click tools that give business users with little to no technical background the capability to quickly develop custom applications. To see how easy it is to quickly create custom applications on the Salesforce Platform, visit our free Trailhead tutorial
You don’t need to be a developer or know code to create new business applications; it’s as simple as pointing and clicking, then dragging and dropping components. You can try point-and-click development now by visiting our free Trailhead tutorial.
With thousands of third-party Salesforce-customized business solutions, Salesforce AppExchange makes the world’s most powerful platform even more powerful. The AppExchange is the Salesforce store, where you can find thousands of apps and Lightning solutions to make it faster and easier to extend Salesforce to every department and industry. You’ll find solutions for ERP, accounting, HR, administration, and so much more. 
No. There’s no infrastructure or software to buy, set up, or manage. Any company of any size with virtually any budget can choose the package with the tools it needs to start building custom cloud applications that immediately help accelerate every area of the business.
Our free trial is your chance to try out the Salesforce Platform free for 30 days (you can even extend your trial — contact sales directly to request an extension). The free trial includes everything you need to build and run custom apps — plus packaged apps from AppExchange — for any department in your business.

Developer edition is a free personal Salesforce instance (org) that has all the capabilities of our Employee Apps license to set up users, create objects, add business logic, and ultimately create and deploy an app.

A Developer edition account cannot be converted to a production account.

While Salesforce customers already benefit from many trust capabilities such as login history, setup audit trail, sharing, two-factor authentication, and IP restrictions and password policies, some customers want more. For customers who have additional needs, Salesforce Shield includes three additional solutions to give customers increased confidentiality, data integrity, and compliance with internal and external regulations:

Event Monitoring lets customers see who is accessing what data from where and monitor user and system activity.

Field Audit Trail lets customers define a complete data lifecycle policy, letting them understand the state of data at any time for up to 10 years and easily comply with industry and financial regulations.

Platform Encryption lets customers seamlessly encrypt sensitive data at rest while still allowing business users to preserve key Salesforce features like search, workflow, and validation rules.

Because Salesforce Shield is built native on the Salesforce Platform, it is seamlessly integrated into all your Salesforce apps. Customers can turn on Salesforce Shield in an afternoon.
As companies move more sensitive data to the cloud, they may want additional mechanisms to protect that data. All customer data is encrypted in transit via https, using Transport Layer Security. For customers who want to encrypt data at rest, Salesforce offers them the ability to seamlessly encrypt sensitive data at rest with just a few clicks. There is no additional hardware or software to manage and customers can encrypt PHI, PII, trade secrets, or other data on a field-by-field basis using point-and-click tools in an afternoon. As Platform Encryption is a native encryption at rest solution in Salesforce, customers can continue to use important application functionality like search, workflow, and validation rules.

Customers maintain full control over the keys and key lifecycle, ensuring the privacy and confidentiality of that data to meet both external and internal data compliance needs. Because Platform Encryption is built natively in Salesforce, data can be encrypted throughout the Salesforce ecosystem, including in partner apps built by ISVs on AppExchange.

Questions? We’ll put you on the right path.

Ask about Salesforce products, pricing, implementation, or anything else. Our knowledgeable reps are standing by, ready to help. Or check out our Pricing and Packaging Guide to learn more.
 
 

What Is Platform As A Service from Salesforce