Salesforce Data Masking – An Overview

Salesforce data masking is a prerequisite to protect data in Production environments and stay compliant with policy and government regulations like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPA), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), and so forth. Today, most organizations utilize data from their Production environments for testing, development and research purposes. Organizations inadvertently breach information when they copy the regulated Production data into non-regulated Salesforce environments. More so, when sensitive data is utilized by developers or testers who do not have the necessary clearance to access it, the data is vulnerable to attacks or leaks.

Traditional data protection techniques like usage of firewalls or passwords are not able to protect data adequately; further, they restrict data usage which negatively impacts the development and testing effort. What enterprises need is a comprehensive technique that can protect data efficiently and make it easily accessible for a variety of purposes with minimal security clearance.

What is Salesforce data masking?

Salesforce data masking is the process of creating a structurally similar yet imitative version of the Production data. With this, organizations can offer a functional substitute for the original data wherever the usage of real data is not required.

Top 3 Benefits of Salesforce data masking:

• Cost-effective solution for data protection
• Viable solution to combat threats like data loss and data breach
• Significant reduction in risks associated with using Production data for development and testing

However, Salesforce data masking is not an easy job. The data must retain the characteristics of the original data. For example, the format of an email must be maintained when masking email addresses of customers, yet it must be transformed to such a degree that it cannot be reverse engineered.

AutoRABIT for Salesforce Data Masking

AutoRABIT is a comprehensive DevOps solution for Salesforce. With 10 years of expertise in DevOps, AutoRABIT works with Salesforce enterprises all over the world, showing proven results.

We have observed organizations implementing DevOps are looking to expose their data to developers and testers faster, without any risk to accelerate their DevOps function. AutoRABIT’s data masking solution is designed to address these common challenges concerning Salesforce teams of various sizes. It allows the users to mask data using different masking styles like pre-processing and post-processing (Prefix and Suffix) functions, shuffling and so on to transform data using random, valid and realistic values. AutoRABIT’s unique masking techniques ensure applications continue to operate without any errors after the process.

Here’s an Infographic that speaks about the various data masking techniques for diverse business needs

AutoRABIT – The Best Salesforce Release Management Platform

Salesforce Release Management refers to the process of planning, scheduling, managing and controlling a Software build through various stages and environments, including testing and deploying applications on Salesforce. Here are some of the Salesforce release management challenges:

Though the definition of Salesforce Release Management sounds precise and simple, the complexity is relative to the size and scale of the organization. More the number of developers working on Salesforce, more complex it gets. It can be extremely intricate to manage the builds across multiple release environments. Deploying multiple metadata members like profiles, permission sets, custom objects and dependencies across different environments can be a tough row to hoe for the developers. Missing even a single metadata member in the process of deployment can fail the entire process. More so, with multiple developers, there is always a possibility of code getting overwritten without a proper source control in place.

Also, one way of avoiding the painstaking job of managing multiple environments is to make changes directly in the Production environments. While this can eliminate the time and effort involved in deployment, the entire application can go out of control with a single piece of error code. Without proper planning and process in place, your team might have to put in extra hours and sleepless nights to avoid your project to go off the schedule. Therefore, a comprehensive release management platform for Salesforce is the need of the hour.

The Need for a Dedicated Salesforce Release Management Platform

AutoRABIT is the leading Salesforce Release Management platform. It resolves all your release management challenges by streamlining and accelerating development and release of your Salesforce applications. All in all, AutoRABIT is a must-have tool for efficient release of Salesforce applications.

Salesforce Continuous Integration with AutoRABIT

Salesforce Continuous Integration had become a development best practice when companies started embracing agile development model to stay competitive in the market. Agile involves short sprints of smooth development, and it is essential that the Salesforce development team is enabled to work efficiently without breaking each other’s code. Salesforce Continuous Integration has been able to help development teams optimize their code for stability, quality, and reliability. It supports sprint style development of agile, by allowing the development teams to adjust and manage the changes in product requirement without having to start from scratch.


What happens in Salesforce Continuous Integration?

Salesforce continuous integration encourages the development teams to integrate their code regularly into a shared version control repository. Every line of code that is committed into the repository is tested by an automated build to make sure the code is executable. The version control repository stands as the source of truth for the code in the Production org. Developers pull the latest code from the repository, work on complete separate sections of the project at the same time and revert to the previous versions if the code is not coming out right. This practice of committing and developing the code is what makes the development through Salesforce continuous integration more comfortable and faster.

Another benefit from Salesforce continuous integration is that it allows the development teams to debug an issue in the code quickly. Development teams can compare the last working file with the faulty file, decreasing the time spent in identifying any problem in the code.
Salesforce development projects that continuously evolve can benefit from Salesforce continuous integration. Salesforce continuous integration should be part of Salesforce as a whole instead of just for a few projects, and this is where tools that offer end-to-end continuous integration support can be of help.

AutoRABIT for Salesforce Continuous Integration

AutoRABIT is the only metadata-aware DevOps solution for Salesforce. It is integrated with industry-leading version control systems like GIT, SVN, and TFS to offer fast, simple, and secure Salesforce continuous integration and delivery.

If you are looking for support on Salesforce continuous integration implementation project, contact our team to learn how some of our clients have done it. We have helped Fortune 100 companies boost their ROI in the last decade or so and we’d love to find out if we’d be a good fit in achieving your Salesforce continuous integration goals too.