What Happens If I Don’t Protect My Salesforce Metadata?
Salesforce metadata is crucial to the stability, functionality, and security of your platform. Failing to properly protect it can lead to a variety of negative outcomes.
Why It Matters: A data security strategy that doesn’t address metadata will lead to issues that impact regulatory compliance and consumer trust.
- Metadata factors into storage limitations and proportionality for regulatory compliance standards.
- Cybercriminals who gain access to metadata can use it to steal sensitive information.
Here are 10 risks of improperly safeguarding your Salesforce metadata:
- Data Loss
- Unauthorized Access
- Operational Disruptions
- Compliance Failures
- Increased Recovery Time
- Inconsistent User Experience
- Theft of Intellectual Property
- Broken Integrations
- Increased Costs
1. Data Loss
Metadata defines the processes surrounding your data and even the way it is routed.
Damage to metadata connections can accidentally or maliciously result in the loss of critical data structures and configurations.
Maintaining current backups of Salesforce metadata and ensuring team members follow best practices for handling it are crucial considerations to provide the protection you need to avoid data loss.
2. Unauthorized Access
Cybercriminals will try everything they can to gain access to your system. And even if they get in through a small crack in your defenses, the damage can be widespread.
Failure to protect metadata can lead to unauthorized access, allowing malicious actors to view or modify sensitive information and system configurations.
Every update and application is full of metadata that needs to be encrypted or otherwise protected to stave off attacks.
3. Operational Disruptions
Metadata holds the configuration settings for your Salesforce environment. This includes the way your applications talk to each other, where data goes after being entered, and more.
Unprotected metadata can lead to unexpected changes, causing system disruptions and negatively impacting business operations.
Every minute spent trying to regain normal operations is time that could otherwise be used to further your business efforts.
4. Compliance Failures
Many industries have strict regulations regarding data protection. Compliance with data security measures requires constant attention. Even the slightest slipup can result in falling out of compliance.
Failing to safeguard metadata can result in noncompliance with regulations, leading to legal and financial repercussions.
Metadata is often connected with other types of sensitive data like personal identifiable information (PII), which is addressed by many regulations.
5. Increased Recovery Time
System outages occur. There are simply too many potential sources of loss to guarantee constant connectivity. When this happens, unprotected metadata will drastically increase the amount of time it takes to fully recover operations.
An out-of-date metadata backup fails to reestablish the functionality and connections necessary to reinstitute current processes.
A current backup of your Salesforce metadata will reduce these disruptions and enable your team to get back to work.
6. Inconsistent User Experience
One of the many roles metadata plays behind the scenes in your Salesforce environment is to define the user interface and user experience.
Unexpected changes can lead to inconsistencies in the user interface, confusing users and reducing productivity.
Reinforcing access points and permissions ensures only approved individuals are able to make changes to metadata.
7. Theft of Intellectual Property
Everyone has heard the definition of metadata as “data about data.” But when that metadata is describing custom code and business logic, it represents valuable intellectual property.
Exposed metadata can be stolen or misused by competitors, hackers, or even malicious insiders.
Ensuring proper permissions with an automated scanner and encrypted sensitive information will go a long way toward preventing this type of theft.
8. Broken Integrations
Most Salesforce users customize their instance to fit their specific business needs. This often involves the utilization of third-party systems or applications. Metadata defines the way these external systems interact with your Salesforce environment.
Damaged metadata can lead to broken integrations, causing data flow issues and impacting business processes that rely on these integrations.
These broken flows can lead to data loss or impact the functionality of your system.
9. Increased Costs
Every business focuses on the cost of performing a task compared to the outcome. Lengthy recovery processes or unnecessarily cumbersome tasks are a major drain on ROI.
Resolving issues arising from unprotected metadata can be time-consuming and expensive, requiring additional resources to restore and secure the system.
Metadata touches every piece of data across your entire Salesforce system. It also defines the way many pieces of the system interact with each other. Failing to protect your metadata can have drastic implications on security, productivity, and compliance.
Next Step…
We can’t overstate the importance of protecting and verifying the stability of your metadata. Are you ready to go even deeper?
Read our ebook, The Ultimate Guide to Salesforce Metadata, to learn everything you need to know.
FAQs
How can I protect my Salesforce metadata?
Data protection requires a comprehensive approach. As you can see above, metadata needs to be as rigorously protected as any other type of data. Here are five ways you can guard your Salesforce metadata:
- Implement Strong Access Controls: Ensure only authorized personnel can access and modify metadata.
- Regularly Back Up Metadata: Regular backups allow you to restore configurations in case of accidental changes or data loss.
- Audit and Monitor Changes: Keep track of changes to metadata and regularly review audit logs to detect and respond to unauthorized changes.
- Use Version Control: Implement version control systems for metadata to manage changes and roll back to previous versions if necessary.
- Conduct Security Training: Educate employees about the importance of metadata protection and best practices for maintaining security.
How many types of metadata are there in Salesforce?
Metadata encompasses a wide range of configuration settings and customizations that define the structure and behavior of the Salesforce environment. It can be broadly categorized into several groups, each serving different aspects of customizing and configuring the Salesforce environment to meet specific business needs.
These groups include:
- Customizations
- Declarative Configurations
- Security Settings
- User Interface Configurations
- Development Components
- Data Management
- Analytics and Reporting
- Integration Settings
- Mobile Configurations
For more information on how to locate Salesforce metadata, check out our blog on 4 Ways to Fetch Metadata in Salesforce.
