Data breaches are getting more sophisticated and expensive. In 2024, the global average cost of a data breach rose 10% year-over-year, reaching $4.9 million. Without a strong data risk assessment, your organization faces threats from all sides: hackers, insiders with excess access, and misconfigurations that leak sensitive data.
Regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and FedRAMP demand tighter controls and frequent audits. Salesforce environments (which are home to customer data, financials, and custom workflows) are especially vulnerable without proactive assessments.
This guide gives you a clear framework for identifying risks, prioritizing threats, and applying safeguards. You’ll turn data risk assessments into a strategic layer of protection and growth, not just another compliance task.
How to Structure Your Data Risk Assessment for Maximum Impact
Your data risk assessment needs three interconnected components:
- Data discovery and classification
- Threat modeling
- Impact-based risk scoring
You can start with data discovery across all your Salesforce orgs. Look for sensitive data in custom objects, formula fields, and external integrations, not just the obvious items in standard objects. Your classification schema should map directly to your compliance requirements, whether that's PII for GDPR, PHI for HIPAA, or CUI for government contracts.
Threat modeling should go beyond a random bad actor. Map out realistic attack vectors:
- Compromised user credentials
- Misconfigured sharing rules
- Over-privileged service accounts
- Vulnerable third-party apps
Your risk scoring must reflect business reality, not just technical severity. A medium-level vulnerability in your customer database might outrank a critical flaw in your development sandbox. Weight your scores by data sensitivity, user population, and potential business disruption.
Include these stakeholders on your assessment team:
- Salesforce admin
- Security lead
- Compliance officer
- Key business stakeholders
Each brings a different perspective such as technical feasibility, threat environment awareness, regulatory requirements, and business impact understanding.
Salesforce environments create unique assessment challenges:
- Permission sets can cascade in unexpected ways
- Apex code can bypass standard security controls
- Metadata changes can alter data access patterns without triggering traditional security alerts
Your data risk assessment framework must account for these platform-specific risks.
Plan for a 4-8 week initial assessment, then establish quarterly reviews with continuous monitoring between cycles. Threats evolve, your data surroundings change, and new compliance requirements emerge. As a result, static assessments quickly become outdated.
How to Build a Data Risk Assessment Framework
To create a data risk assessment, you need a systematic approach. Here's a practical framework designed for Salesforce environments you can use:
Data Inventory and Classification
Begin by mapping every piece of data in your Salesforce ecosystem. Begin with standard objects like Accounts, Contacts, and Opportunities, then move to custom objects and fields. Your data stewards or Salesforce administrators should lead this effort, updating the inventory quarterly or whenever significant system changes occur.
Implement a four-tier classification system:
- Public (shareable externally)
- Internal (employee access only)
- Confidential (restricted business information)
- Restricted (regulated or highly sensitive data)
For each data element, document its sensitivity level, regulatory requirements, and business criticality. Map data flows between Salesforce and external systems, as these integration points often represent your highest risk areas.
Use Salesforce's native field audit trail and data classification features to automate discovery where possible. Document which third-party applications have access to each data type and the specific fields they can read or modify.
Flosum's native architecture provides additional visibility into data lineage across your development and deployment pipeline, helping you track how sensitive data moves through different environments.
Threat and Vulnerability Identification
Catalog potential threats systematically, starting with:
- External attack vectors like phishing campaigns targeting privileged users
- API exploitation and third-party application vulnerabilities
- Internal risks, such as over-privileged users and weak password policies
- Accidental data exposure through reports or dashboards
Review permission sets and profiles for excessive access. Examine sharing rules that could expose sensitive records to the wrong users. Audit API access, including connected apps and OAuth tokens that may provide unintended system entry. Also, evaluate your sandbox refresh policies—using production data in development environments introduces unnecessary risk.
Additionally, conduct regular penetration testing of your Salesforce environment, including attempts to escalate privileges and access restricted data.
Risk Analysis and Prioritization
Develop a quantitative risk scoring methodology combining threat likelihood with potential business impact. Create a 5x5 risk matrix rating both factors from 1 (very low) to 5 (very high). Factor in regulatory penalties, operational disruption costs, and reputational damage when calculating impact scores.
Prioritize risks based on three criteria:
- Criticality to business operations
- Ease of exploitation
- Effort required for remediation
High-priority Salesforce risks typically include:
- Unrestricted administrative access
- Unencrypted sensitive fields
- Overly broad sharing rules for confidential data
Weight compliance-driven risks are higher if your industry faces significant regulatory scrutiny.
Document your analysis thoroughly for audit purposes, including the rationale behind each risk score and prioritization decision. This documentation is important during compliance reviews and helps justify security investments to leadership.
Mitigation Strategy Design
Design layered controls addressing each identified risk. Implement:
- Preventive controls: field-level encryption for sensitive data, IP restrictions for administrative access, and multi-factor authentication for privileged users
- Detective controls: enhanced audit logging, anomaly detection for unusual data access patterns, and regular access reviews
- Corrective controls: automated responses to security incidents and clear escalation procedures
For Salesforce environments, use platform security features such as Shield Platform Encryption, Event Monitoring, and Transaction Security policies to create defensive layers.
Balance security with usability by involving business stakeholders in control design. Create remediation plans with specific ownership assignments, realistic timelines, and measurable success criteria.
Flosum's security features can strengthen your mitigation strategy through automated code scanning, deployment controls, and audit trails that provide visibility into all system changes.
Monitoring and Review Cycles
Establish continuous monitoring for key risk indicators like failed login attempts, unusual data exports, and privilege escalations.
Implement a tiered review schedule:
- Monthly: High-sensitivity data access
- Quarterly: Moderate-risk areas
- Annually: Complete full assessments
Integrate risk monitoring into daily IT operations through automated alerts and dashboard reporting. Enhanced Salesforce DevOps automation can simplify these workflows and reduce manual oversight.
Create meaningful metrics that resonate with different stakeholders: technical teams need detailed vulnerability counts, while executives require trend analysis and risk reduction percentages. Adapt your assessment methodology as your organization's data use evolves, guaranteeing your framework remains relevant over time.
Identify Hidden Salesforce Data Risks
Salesforce environments hide data risks that standard security assessments miss entirely. Your metadata configurations, such as workflows, validation rules, and Apex code, create unexpected data exposure paths. A misconfigured workflow can automatically share sensitive customer data with unauthorized users, while poorly written Apex code bypasses your sharing rules completely.
Integration vulnerabilities require immediate attention. Every connected app, API endpoint, and third-party integration creates attack vectors most teams overlook.
When auditing integrations, focus on:
- Which external systems have access to your data, and what level of permissions they hold
- Whether those permissions follow the principle of least privilege
- Identifying dormant or unused integrations with elevated access
- Finding forgotten third-party apps that are still actively pulling data
Permission-related vulnerabilities are the trickiest to spot. Key areas to examine include:
- Over-privileged users with unnecessary access rights
- Broken role hierarchies creating unintended data visibility
- Profile misconfigurations allowing excessive data exposure
- Inconsistent field-level security settings
Sandbox environments also create compliance nightmares. Organizations routinely copy production data to sandboxes without scrubbing sensitive information, violating compliance requirements and exposing customer data.
You can use Salesforce's native assessment tools to manage data risks:
- Shield's event monitoring to track user activity patterns
- Field audit trail to monitor changes to sensitive data
- Setup audit trail to document when configurations changed
- These tools reveal patterns standard security scans can't detect
Flosum's native Salesforce architecture amplifies this assessment process through comprehensive version control and deployment management. The platform's detailed audit trails track changes across your entire Salesforce ecosystem, making hidden risks visible before they become breaches.
Design Backup Strategies Based on Your Data Risk Assessment Findings
Data risk assessments become meaningless unless they inform real backup decisions. The criticality levels you’ve defined should shape your backup frequency and recovery timeframes.
Map your risk classifications to backup schedules:
- High-risk customer data needs daily or hourly backups
- Financial and operational data typically requires daily protection
- Documentation and training materials can wait for weekly protection
Set your recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) based on business costs. For example, if customer data loss costs $10,000 per hour, design for minutes of downtime, not hours.
Compliance requirements from your data risk assessment dictate retention rules:
- GDPR demands precise deletion capabilities for "right to be forgotten" requests
- Financial regulations require decades of immutable storage
- Healthcare standards often mandate encrypted, redundant backups
Test recovery procedures using the same risk prioritization. Run quarterly tests on your highest-risk data first, then work down the list. You should aim to document every test for audit trails.
Flosum's Composite Backup technology offers several advantages in this regard:
- Captures only changed data, reducing backup windows and storage costs
- Allows point-in-time recovery of individual records—no full system restore required
- Includes BYOK encryption and audit logs to meet compliance standards
- Offers flexible deployment options to support data sovereignty needs identified in your risk assessment
The backup strategy becomes a direct reflection of your risk tolerance. Critical systems get aggressive protection, lower-risk data gets economical coverage, and compliance requirements get precise controls.
Evaluate and Select Data Risk Assessment Tools
You'll encounter four categories of data risk assessment tools:
- DSPM platforms for comprehensive visibility
- Automated scanning tools for vulnerability detection
- Classification systems for sensitive data tagging
- Compliance management solutions for regulatory reporting
Be sure to map your requirements before reaching out to vendors. For example, you should define your Salesforce environment complexity, data volume, and compliance mandates first.
Your evaluation criteria should focus on:
- Native Salesforce integration depth: Can the tool access metadata, custom objects, and permission hierarchies without hitting API limits?
- Implementation speed: Fast deployment is more critical than an extensive feature list when threats evolve rapidly.
- Cost-to-value ratio: Does the solution align with your organization's risk profile and security priorities?
For your proof of concept, set concrete success metrics:
- Detection accuracy above 95%
- False positive rates below 10%
- Time-to-value under 30 days
Ask vendors these specific questions:
- How does your tool handle Salesforce's sharing model complexity?
- Can you analyze custom permission sets and role hierarchies?
- What happens when we hit API rate limits during scanning?
Test real scenarios during your POC. Upload actual metadata samples, simulate common misconfigurations, and measure how quickly the tool identifies privilege escalation paths. The best tools catch problems your manual reviews miss.
Open-source tools require internal expertise but offer unlimited customization, while commercial solutions deploy faster but lock you into vendor roadmaps.
The best approach combines automated monitoring with native Salesforce awareness, eliminating manual correlation and reducing the need for deep in-house expertise.
Build Data Risk Assessment Into Your Daily Operations
Managing data risk works best when it’s part of how teams operate every day.
Each business unit should have a data steward who understands how information is used in their workflows. In IT, assign technical risk owners to manage platform-level controls and support secure development. Executive sponsors play a key role in helping teams prioritize this work and resolve cross-functional blockers.
Training is most effective when it reflects the real decisions people make. Administrators should know what to look for when configuring user permissions. Developers benefit from guidance on evaluating data exposure when creating custom objects or building integrations. Business users need practical examples of how data might be mishandled in tools they use every day—reports, spreadsheets, or shared dashboards.
To be sustainable, risk management needs to fit into existing workflows. Add a short security review to quarterly business reviews. Include risk validation in change management processes. Run exposure checks before major Salesforce releases. These checkpoints create regular opportunities to catch issues without adding overhead.
Most importantly, connect data risk management to business goals. Strong governance prevents expensive breaches, supports audit readiness, and protects the systems your teams rely on.
Flosum supports this kind of integrated approach with automated compliance monitoring, built-in audit trails, and tools that keep security aligned with everyday work.
Make Data Risk Assessment a Habit
Ongoing data risk assessment minimizes downtime, prevents compliance penalties, and builds customer trust. Take these immediate steps to start your data risk assessment:
- Conduct a quick data inventory: Identify where your most sensitive data lives across your Salesforce environments
- Review current user permissions: Audit who has access to what data and verify those permissions remain appropriate
- Document your backup strategy: Confirm your backup frequency matches your data criticality levels
- Schedule quarterly data risk assessments: Block recurring calendar time to reassess your risk landscape
- Assign clear ownership: Designate specific team members for ongoing risk monitoring
Flosum's DevSecOps and data management platform supports the entire data risk assessment lifecycle, built specifically for Salesforce environments to maintain continuous visibility and control over your data risks.
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