Salesforce is the favorite of business users lately as one of the most sophisticated and flexible CMS sales management platforms. The layered design makes data sharing easily and lets various types of users to set data exposure in a customized way. With this properly layered structure, the administrators can also allot data to the users by setting restrictions as to whom to view which data to ensure optimum data security.
Business users of Salesforce can use the profiles and permissions to specify the objects and fields for each user to access and can set it organization-wide to specify individual user roles for viewing and editing data. On planning specific security rules, make sure that you prepare a table to differentiate various types of users and their privileges.
Later, by using this table, you can do an appropriate mapping of data at various levels to be accessed by each user type. Also, try to specify the fields and records with specific objects and keep the table updated as the data grows over time. Properly doing this will ensure optimally secured data administration on Salesforce.
Considering object level security
As we have discussed above, object level permissions are vital in ensuring security. This is also called as object-level security, which is an efficient approach in data management and control. With the use of object protocols and permission, it becomes easy for the admin to prevent any unauthorized users from accessing the crucial data and also could block them from creating any new data or editing any object set like user info, business stats, etc.
The object permission features on Salesforcecan also be used to protect the entire tabs and objects too for various types of users so that they may not know that such a set of data even exists and try to access it. Administrators may also have to allow permissions to various profiles and the permission sets. It is also possible to use a custom set of data that will further determine what the users can access each application.
Ensuring field-level security
In many typical use cases, you may have to provide access to various objects to particular users. Still, having the need to limit access to specific fields, you can adopt field-level security. This approach will control what each user can read, edit, or delete in various fields.
Record level security
After setting both objects as well as field-level securities, admins can then focus on record-level security, which will define user access to various object records. In this setting, the ownership of each record will be assigned to a user or a queue. These owners will have unrestricted access to the specific record assigned to them and also will have the authority to set privileges to those who are lower in the hierarchy.
Creation of user profiles
On Salesforce using Flosum.com, the user profiles could be easily set based on the job roles of each user like technical admin, marketing or sales team member, etc. It is also possible to assign a custom set profile to various users, but user types can be assigned to typical profiles only. The admins can use such permission sets to ensure add-on access to multiple users of different categories.
Along with the above, the role hierarchy and organization-wide sharing are other concepts on planning security administration on Salesforce.
HIPAA compliance for Salesforce
When it comes to usage of Salesforce in healthcare and allied industries, HIPAA compliance is one thing the administrators are users are going to hear most frequently. HIPPA focuses on the protection of the confidentiality and integrity of the PHP (protected health information. In general sense, PHI pdf form checklist includes patient names, birth dates, social security numbers, addresses, as well as other individually identifiable information. It is not only healthcare institutions, but any business catering to healthcare or have first, second, or third-degree relations with healthcare services need to ensure HIPAA compliance to ensure long-term sustainability. Let’s further discuss the HIPAA compliance features of Salesforce.
Controlling access to PHP
Electronic PHI or ePHI is what you need to focus on while dealing with online patient care info at the first point, whereas the best practices to protect such data is to lock such data through strict measures. You need to ensure a strong DLP policy to minimize or eradicate the possibility of unauthorized access. As of late, there are various cloud info platforms to work with Salesforce like CipherCloud Cloud, etc., which ensures HIPAA compliance and block any other attempts for violations.
ePHI encryption
When it comes to ensuring HIPAA compliance, not only user activity, you need to restrict. The integrated model of cloud info platforms offers features like tokenization and encryption, which further puts forth the scope of applying security at a granular level, i.e., to each field level or character level, etc. These cloud info protection platforms could be easily deployed as gateways to encrypt data automatically at each point. This will act as a gateway to ensure the integrity of sensitive info in ePHI.
Considering all these things, HIPAA may be a bit confusing to the first time administrators. However, one thing to be kept in mind is that these regulations are so essential and demand optimum protection of patient healthcare information. On violating, you will have to suffer huge penalties. Most importantly, any violation may also end up the destruction of the entire reputation of the organization.
So, the healthcare users of Salesforce must ensure foolproof encryption of data as a default need to ensure ePHI protection and HIPAA compliance. Salesforce Healthcare Cloud adoption could bring in revolutionary changes to the healthcare industry by providing the utmost accuracy and efficiency to healthcare facilities as well as the service providers to the healthcare sector.
Going, we could expect more in terms of security as Salesforce is focusing more on streamlining the application of it on the healthcare domain. Moreover, medical and healthcare practices are also getting more sophisticated across the globe, which will further mandate the data protection and security administration rules and regulations even globally.
Author Bio: Sujain Thomas is a writer and SEO expert. Nowadays Sujain manages and writes for Flosum.com. Her primary focus is on “Salesforce DX”. She is responsible for building content that helps IT professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.
