The critical data underpinning your company’s most sensitive operations, from M&A contracts to patient health records, might be residing in a digital environment that your security team has never systematically audited. For countless organizations, Salesforce has quietly evolved from a specialized sales tool into a sprawling operational backbone, yet the security practices governing it have remained dangerously stagnant, creating an attack surface of immense and often unacknowledged proportions. This disconnect between the platform’s strategic importance and its security oversight represents one of the most significant hidden risks in the modern enterprise landscape.
A System of Record Beyond Sales
For many organizations, the term Salesforce still evokes images of customer relationship management, sales pipelines, and marketing campaigns. While it excels at these functions, its role has expanded far beyond its original mandate. Today, enterprises leverage the platform for a vast array of critical operations. It is used in healthcare to manage sensitive patient data, in the legal sector to handle confidential contracts, and in fintech to oversee customer balances and trades. It has become a de facto operating system for business, tracking everything from supply chains to customer-facing web services.
This profound integration into core business processes has created a significant governance gap. Because of its historical roots, Salesforce administration often falls under the purview of sales or marketing departments, not the central IT or cybersecurity teams. This organizational silo means that the platform, despite its critical nature and the sensitive data it holds, is frequently exempt from the rigorous security policies and oversight applied to the rest of the company’s technology stack. It exists as a shadow IT environment, managed by business users who may lack the security expertise to defend it properly.
From Sales Tool to Sprawling Digital Ecosystem
The evolution of Salesforce is not merely about expanded use cases; it is a fundamental transformation into what Prasanth Samudrala, VP of Products at AutoRABIT, calls “company-management software.” Enterprises that continue to view it as just another application or CRM fail to recognize its true nature. In reality, Salesforce is a programmable platform with its own intricate permission models, a unique data architecture, and powerful automations that execute critical business logic daily. This complexity makes it a powerful business enabler but also a formidable security challenge.
This platform has consequently become a goldmine of sensitive information. “I think you would be shocked at the amount of PII and PHI data that is stored in Salesforce,” says Lindsay Duran, CMO at AutoRABIT. She notes that for many companies, “Salesforce is in fact one of the largest repositories of confidential information of any solution.” This concentration of high-value data, combined with a lack of dedicated security oversight, transforms the platform into a prime target for threat actors seeking to exfiltrate proprietary or personal information for financial gain or competitive advantage.
Widening Cracks in a Heavily Customized Armor
A common misconception among business leaders is that Salesforce is inherently secure. While Salesforce does an excellent job securing its cloud infrastructure, this responsibility is shared. “Salesforce secures their boundaries. Nobody can breach into the Salesforce data boundary,” explains Samudrala. “But you, Mr. CISO, you, Mr. CIO, are responsible for your org’s governance configuration code and data lifecycle.” The platform is delivered as a secure package, but security posture begins to degrade the moment an organization customizes it to meet specific business needs.
Every customization, configuration change, and line of custom code introduces the potential for “drift” away from a secure baseline. As Duran states, “As soon as you make a change to it, you own that change.” This drift creates vulnerabilities that did not exist in the out-of-the-box solution. The problem is compounded by common administrative practices, such as cloning existing user profiles to grant new employees access. This method often perpetuates excessive permissions, creating a tangled web of over-privileged accounts that security teams struggle to untangle. This internal complexity creates fertile ground for both insider threats and external attacks.
Further exacerbating the risk is the proliferation of third-party applications from the AppExchange, which can introduce vulnerabilities if not properly vetted. Over-privileged OAuth tokens for these apps became a significant attack vector in the summer of 2025, when threat groups like Shiny Hunters and Scattered Spider exploited them to steal data from dozens of companies. Compounding this is the rise of the “citizen developer,” empowered by low-code and AI-assisted tools to build and deploy applications rapidly. “You’re skipping your traditional checks and balances you have during the software development lifecycle,” warns Samudrala, pointing out that this speed often comes at the expense of security.
A Call to Action from Security Experts
The unique architecture of Salesforce presents a challenge that traditional security tools are ill-equipped to handle. “Traditional AppSec [tools] do not monitor Salesforce,” Samudrala explains. “They don’t understand the Salesforce lineage or hierarchy or the terms that they use, and so the traditional tools don’t capture it.” This blindness means that even companies with mature application security programs may have a complete lack of visibility into the risks accumulating within their Salesforce environment, from misconfigurations to vulnerabilities in custom Apex code.
Addressing this requires a fundamental shift in how organizations approach Salesforce security, starting with bridging the gap between different teams. Justin Hazard, Principal Security Architect at AutoRABIT, highlights the core issue: “There are the Salesforce devs and admins that know Salesforce really well, and then you have the traditional security folks that know security really well and understand application security. We’re trying to bridge that gap between the two.” Fostering collaboration and shared understanding between these groups is the first step toward building a cohesive security strategy for the platform.
From Reactive to Proactive a Blueprint for Salesforce Security
Securing a Salesforce organization requires a strategic, multi-faceted approach that mirrors the discipline applied to traditional IT environments. The initial step is to establish a comprehensive security baseline of the entire instance. This model of a clean, secure configuration becomes the benchmark against which all changes are measured, allowing security teams to spot dangerous drift as it happens. This foundational work must be paired with the implementation of secure templates for user profiles, enforcing a least-privilege model from the outset rather than perpetuating risk by cloning over-permissioned accounts.
With a strong foundation, the focus shifts to governing data and code. This involves leveraging automated tools to scan, classify, and tag all data within the Salesforce org, ensuring that sensitive information is identified and protected with appropriate controls. Simultaneously, organizations must integrate Salesforce-specific continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, complete with automated code scanning for the platform’s proprietary languages. These processes embed security directly into the development lifecycle, catching vulnerabilities before they reach production.
Finally, a mature security posture demands rigorous control over access and enforcement of enterprise-wide policies. This includes scrutinizing the permissions of all third-party applications, implementing strict lifecycle controls for access tokens, and extending company security frameworks like Zero Trust to the Salesforce environment. Automating this governance through policy-as-code ensures that security rules are enforced consistently and continuously. As Samudrala concludes, CISOs and CIOs must recognize Salesforce as a critical attack surface and build a robust security framework around it, starting with a deep understanding of what constitutes a secure baseline versus a risky deviation.
The evidence presented a clear narrative: the strategic role of Salesforce within the enterprise had far outpaced the security paradigms used to govern it. This gap, born from organizational silos and a fundamental misunderstanding of the platform’s complexity, was shown to have created one of the most significant and overlooked attack surfaces in modern business. The path forward required a paradigm shift, moving beyond outdated notions of Salesforce as a simple CRM. It necessitated treating the platform as a core pillar of the enterprise technology stack, demanding the same level of security rigor, automated governance, and cross-functional oversight as any other critical system.
