Can you spend 4.48 million USD? Yes! You read it right! It can cost that much, as per IBM’s cost of data breach report 2025. Now, combine it with the increasing risk of malware and ransomware attacks, which increased by 68% in 2023. It’s not even include the other threats to your Salesforce data from human error, macro updates, unintended sandbox refreshes, and device sync issues. Here is where you need to implement steps to prevent accidental data loss in Salesforce. By building the following habits and safeguards, you can prevent accidental loss and make recovery faster if it happens.
1. Analyze and Classify Data Assets
When you analyze and classify data sets it helps you understand which safeguards you need to apply to which data. Therefore, you must have a clear understanding of what resides within your Salesforce data. It helps you create the foundation for retention rules, access control, and backup policies that follow.
Every object, field, and file across your Salesforce’s production and sandbox environments requires cataloging. You can use automated discovery platforms that are specifically designed to find hidden custom fields, identify potential risks, and crawl the Salesforce schema.
Use the following type of tiered structure for the same.
| Tier | Data Type | What’s Included In It? |
|---|---|---|
| Tier-1 | Highly Sensitive | Payment card data, personally identifiable information, and protected health information |
| Tier-2 | Regulated | Audit trails, financial records, and contractual data |
| Tier-3 | Confidential | Employee data, intellectual property, strategic plans |
| Tier-4 | Internal | Internal communications, operational metrics |
| Tier-5 | Public | Public documentation, marketing content |
This kind of classification creates a robust foundation, but its value only emerges when organizations enforce it via access controls.
2. Implement Least-Privilege Access Controls
When you implement least privilege access control, it does not allow unauthorized users to delete or modify data. Accidental data loss occurs when the wrong person holds the wrong permission. Therefore, you must build a role-permission matrix as it works as a foundation. This matrix defines record visibility along the management hierarchy. Thus, higher roles inherit lower-level data.
Implement multi-factor authentication and single sign-on to verify identity and simplify de-provisioning. Review the entitlement quarterly. Implement a practical review cycle that includes analyzing the current role, permission-set assignments, and profile.
Keep in mind that access control restricts who can modify data, but it cannot prevent exposure when authorized users accidentally export or share records. Here is where encryption comes in handy. It adds a second layer of protection that safeguards data even after it leaves the controlled environment.
3. Implement Data Encryption
Encryption prevents unauthorized users from accessing data without proper keys. This way, it limits damage from accidental exports or unauthorized access. It helps you reduce harm caused by human error. So, protect data in transit and at rest.
Transport Layer Security helps you encrypt traffic between integrations, user devices, and Salesforce servers. Shield Platform Encryption handles data at rest through AES – Advanced Encryption Standard keys.
Here is how you can match encryption to sensitivity tiers.
| Tier | Data Type | Data Set | Encryption Required |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tier-1 | Highly Sensitive | Payment card data, personally identifiable information, and protected health information | Full Shield Platform Encryption coverage |
| Tier-2 | Regulated | Audit trails, financial records, and contractual data | Shield encryption to meet compliance requirements |
| Tier-3 | Confidential | Employee data, intellectual property, strategic plans | Field-level encryption |
| Tier-4 | Internal | Internal communications, operational metrics | Only default TLS |
| Tier-5 | Public | Public documentation, marketing content | Only default TLS protection |
Additionally, manage encryption keys securely and restrict their access to the minimum number of personnel within the security team.
4. Formalize Change Management
Generally, misconfiguration and integration failure become the top causes of Salesforce data incidents. If you want to prevent it, formalize the change management and deployment workflows. Formal change management requires review and approval before modifications reach production. Therefore, it provides every change a clear owner, a documented rationale, and the rollback path.
To formalize the change management, you must establish a written governance policy. Besides, ensure every change requires structured approvals for every change. If you want to reduce human errors, you can even automate deployment.
5. Prioritize Automated and Tested Backups
Sometimes a single misconfigured integration can accidentally delete your important Salesforce records in seconds. Therefore, implement automated backup as it enables rapid recovery if accidental data loss occurs. However, for that, organizations must test recovery procedures before any disaster occurs.
Here are a few things that you need to keep in mind.
- Set the backup frequency based on your business criticality.
- Use immune backups because they write every copy in the write-once-read-many format. It means that once the data is stored, it cannot be modified or deleted until the retention window has passed. It blocks ransomware from encrypting or erasing the last good copy.
- Test the recovery at three levels, like single record, related object set, and full-organization recovery.
6. Continuously Monitor and Audit
When you constantly monitor the data, it transforms raw log data into an early warning signal which stops accidental deletion before it spreads. Here are some best practices that you can implement.
- First, you need to identify what matters the most. For that, you need to identify events that pose the greatest risk, such as unusual API activity, profiles, permission sets, and large data exports. Set automated alerts for these, as they catch these issues more quickly than manual checks.
- Set the baseline to find out abnormal behaviour.
- You must conduct weekly audits, analyzing high-risk events from the previous seven days and cross-checking them against integration schedules and approved releases.
- There are specific patterns like multiple profile changes that are executed outside the maintenance window, service accounts suddenly downloading more records than human users, etc. When you constantly watch for these red flags, it strengthens the monitoring program over time.
Final Thoughts
Data is the lifeblood of Salesforce, and once it is lost, it can be difficult and expensive to recover it. Therefore, it is essential to establish guardrails that prevent data loss before it occurs.
Implement access control, automation testing, regular backups, and user training. Each layer of protection adds resilience to your system. If you need help to prevent accidental data loss, connect with us today. At Oddeven Infotech, we have skilled and seasoned Salesforce experts who guide you on how you can prevent accidental data loss and even develop customized Salesforce apps and websites.
