In the last Security Partnership post, Adam Torman discussed event monitoring and how it gives users a granular-level of visibility into their Salesforce apps, allowing customers to see what changes are being made with each event. Field Audit Trail expands that visibility to a broader scale. Think of it this way: Event Monitoring gives you a recent picture of how your data is being accessed, while Field Audit Trail give you a historical view of the entire data state changes, up to ten years. It’s the correlation of events and the data state that shows you the real picture of your business.

10 years ago, people were using Salesforce’s platform almost exclusively for the CRM. Today, we’re seeing companies use the platform to connect their infrastructure, and run many more functions of their business like their HR organization or their accounting processes. The flexibility and scalability of cloud has opened the door to companies — in all sorts of industries —  storing this new kinds of data on the platform. New kinds of data means new requirements for managing that data effectively, especially for industries that have specialized retention and audit requirements.

That’s where Field Audit Trail comes into the picture.

What is Field Audit Trail?

Companies in regulated industries like Health & Life Science and Finance have a higher level of compliance requirements that they need to meet in order to ensure data security, accountability, and transparency. So we created Field Audit Trail, which expands the field history tracking you get out of the box with Salesforce. You are able to track a greater set of fields per object, for a longer period of time, and see who made changes to fields exactly when they did it. It also automates contract-sealed policies, which helps companies meet their compliance goals. IT can define policies to retain archived field history data (for up to ten years), and let Field Audit Trail take care of the rest. Data integrity is preserved, and fidelity remains dependable.

Bonus for the Business

But let’s talk beyond regulation and policies. On one hand, Field Audit Trail helps you stay compliant, but on the other, it’s also a wealth of big data, creating a data lake. Businesses can use this historic recording of data fidelity to gain a holistic view of the business to glean insights from. Think of what you could learn with audit history:

• Business process metrics: how long cases or opportunities spend in various stages, patterns in opportunities and deals,

• Customer and product alignment: evolving customer demands, product evolution and success

• Data states: event correlations, data leakage detection

Essentially, customers can see data state changes at the field level to understand trends and find abnormalities. Imagine a scenario where a CEO asks for an update on how often opportunity quotes were changed over the past five years. Well, now because your IT team implemented Field Audit Trail, you can access the field history data on the opportunity object, and come back to the table with historical insights into how your sales reps adjust quotes to close deals. Extract your data via a bulk download or API, import the data into your own analytics tool or build an app with Force.com. And because Field Audit Trail handles the storage data on our trusted platform, it limits the access of data to a few select users. Less eyes and more automation on the data means, greater security and minimizes errors.

The Security Partnership

Through comprehensive field history and tracking data state changes, the security partnership is alive and well. The CISO gets to have peace of mind that compliance needs are taken care of, and that the company’s data integrity and fidelity is intact. And, with added help from Salesforce Shield’s platform encryption (encrypted data stays encrypted, but still searchable) — which we’ll cover off on in our next post. Meanwhile, business leaders reap the benefits of having a substantial archive of data to identify patterns and visualize  trends to improve business over time.

Whether its for external compliance, audits, or business insights, Field Audit Trail lets you know the state and value of your data for any date, at any time. In creating a forensic data-level audit, companies can ensure that IT is doing exactly what the business requires, gain valuable insights to make smarter decisions,  and build a new level of trust and transparency with their customers.