In the last Security Partnership post, Jim Rivera talked about why both IT and the business ends of a company need to form a partnership to ensure both parties come together to set security standards, select tools to achieve their goals, and identify the correct path forward. The ability to monitor events within your Salesforce org can not only help secure data and information, but also helps businesses make data-driven decisions on improving processes, and optimizing applications for better performance. This is how Event Monitoring and all of Salesforce Shield helps business leaders and security leaders come to the table together.

What is Event Monitoring?

Companies are using cloud services to store their data more each day, and many tough questions are being raised by leadership regarding security expectations, app usage, and their investment in the cloud. Event monitoring answers those questions by providing customers with a granular-level of visibility into their Salesforce apps to optimize business processes. Simply put: customers can see what users are clicking on, exporting, and interacting with down to the record level of granularity. Each activity/event can be tracked to identify trends or abnormal behavior, leading you to take action to safeguard your data.

IT’s Behind-the-Scenes Assistant

One of IT’s main goals is to provide support to end users. Many organizations do this by rolling out new applications, but if the apps aren’t reliable or performing well, users won’t adopt them. With Salesforce Shield, event monitoring solves this problem by giving IT a view of user interactions and app performance data by capturing millions of events. Thus, IT can see where issues are occurring, fix or improve the issue, and then gauge performance on new interfaces, integrations and optimized user workflows they’ve implemented. Troubleshooting and addressing problems becomes much easier and minimizes the impact to business. For instance, when reports or pages are slow, it affects the productivity of an organization. By optimizing those reports and pages, IT can save on hours or days of unproductive time that users would have spent waiting for pages or reports to load or complete.

In a classic scenario, IT can track users who are leaving the company, with access to sensitive information, to ensure that they aren’t downloading merger and acquisition files or company strategy presentations. Let’s say a user who normally only exports one or two filtered reports of customer list information starts downloading unfiltered lists of customers. It raises a red flag that they are using data on accounts that they don't own for purposes other than their job. As a result, a few security measures can save the company from costly financial losses.

Big Business Benefits

Event monitoring in Salesforce isn’t just for safeguarding your data—it does double-duty to help improve app performance and increase adoptions as well, which makes business users happy. How? It can help you analyze which parts of your apps aren't performing well. For example, have you ever tried to pull a report that was slow to load? It’s one of the top customer performance issues. Event monitoring can uncover where the bottleneck is happening. Speeding up the report could be something as simple as removing a column, simplifying the criteria uses, or asking support for additional indexes on the data being reported. Using with event monitoring, a developer can look at event logs to see if the problem lies with a network connection, or if it’s a configuration issue. Or perhaps there’s low adoption for one of your apps. Event monitoring helps you pinpoint what areas need an increased adoption effort and helps identify parts of the app that need redevelopment.

Using event monitoring, companies can take steps to protect their data and better understand how their Salesforce apps are being used. This becomes a huge advantage in understanding how your users are actually using and adopting a platform, and gives companies data-driven insight into optimizing performance that both business and IT leadership can benefit from.

To learn more about how Salesforce Shield can help security and business leaders build and run trusted applications faster than ever, click the banner below to watch our free webinar with PwC.