GLBA compliance in Salesforce change delivery

Ensuring GLBA compliance in Salesforce change delivery is critical for financial institutions like banks, mortgage lenders, insurance companies, and more. But this isn’t as easy as it may seem.

There are several distinct challenges when it comes to ensuring the protection and privacy of personal information in the release process, which we discuss here. Fortunately, Prodly makes it easy to meet all these requirements—so you can strengthen your security posture and avoid the exposure of sensitive data.

GLBA compliance challenges in Salesforce change delivery

If you’re a financial institution, GLBA compliance is paramount—not only to avoid fines and imprisonment, but also to retain your customers’ trust.

However, the change delivery process in Salesforce is a complex endeavor that often involves multiple teams and environments. As a result, controlling who has access to what data can be extremely complicated and difficult.

Potential vulnerabilities in GLBA compliance within Salesforce change delivery

There are several aspects of the Salesforce release management process that could potentially be vulnerable to GLBA noncompliance:

• Data security during testing: Testing is crucial to ensure system functionality and enhancements. However, if you don’t handle test data with the utmost care, it can inadvertently expose sensitive customer information. Let’s say a developer mistakenly gains access to actual customer data due to inadequate data masking policies. This could lead to data privacy violations—and potentially expose you to legal repercussions.
• Change management: GLBA compliance requires you to put a robust change management process in place. This process should ensure that every change to your Salesforce instance, no matter how minor, is thoroughly tested and properly approved to avoid compromising data security and integrity. For instance, suppose a team member introduces a new configuration outside of the formal change management process. If it contains a bug, the issue could impact data protection, which would put you at risk of data breaches.
• Impact assessment: It’s crucial to effectively evaluate how changes will affect your production environment before releasing them. Consider a situation where a seemingly innocent modification to a workflow unintentionally exposes sensitive customer information to unauthorized users. This constitutes a data breach—and noncompliance.
• Access control: Robust access controls are pivotal in safeguarding data from unauthorized access. Without a stringent access control policy, there’s always a risk of exposing sensitive financial data to unauthorized individuals. Picture a scenario where an employee gains unrestricted access to customer financial records. Now imagine how easy it would be for them to use that information to their own advantage—at the cost of your customers. What would that do to your reputation—and your business?
• Change tracking and documentation: To maintain compliance with GLBA, you need to track and document all changes. The reason for this is that an auditor may have questions regarding accountability and traceability. For example, if you can’t provide a clear trail of changes to configurations that impact data protection during an audit, it will almost certainly put you under the auditor’s microscope.

Now you know what the potential vulnerabilities are, let’s examine how Prodly helps you maintain the security, confidentiality, and integrity of your customers’ data.

Prodly for GLBA-Compliant Salesforce change delivery

Prodly’s solutions for data are specifically designed with compliance in mind. Here’s how they can help protect your Salesforce change delivery from noncompliance.

Data security and confidentiality

With Prodly, it’s easy to protect customer data in Salesforce change management:

• We provide in-flight data encryption, which significantly reduces the likelihood of data misuse—even in the event of a breach.
• Prodly’s desktop-free data migration capabilities keep all sensitive data within the Salesforce cloud. Because of this, you never have to download nonpublic personal information (NPI) to your desktop anymore. And that goes a long way to preventing data breaches.
• Our data masking and data obfuscation features protect customer data from inadvertent exposure during the data seeding and testing stages.

Unauthorized access

GLBA requires you to strictly control who has access to sensitive data. With Prodly, you can set access permissions at the environment level. This provides another level of protection against unauthorized use of data.

GLBA compliance: We’ve got you!

GLBA compliance can seem like a huge challenge—but with Prodly, you can tackle the Salesforce release process with confidence. It addresses any potential weak spots within your Salesforce change delivery process so you can build a rock-solid, GLBA-compliant pipeline. With Prodly, you can easily uphold your promise of trust to your customers—and at the same time, ensure compliance with the law.