salesforce_security_impl_guide

Security Overview
Auditing
• Role hierarchy—Once you’ve specified organization-wide sharing settings, the first way you can give wider access to records is
with a role hierarchy. Similar to an organization chart, a role hierarchy represents a level of data access that a user or group of
users needs. The role hierarchy ensures that users higher in the hierarchy always have access to the same data as people lower
in their hierarchy, regardless of the organization-wide default settings. Role hierarchies don’t have to match your organization
chart exactly. Instead, each role in the hierarchy should represent a level of data access that a user or group of users needs.
You can also use a territory hierarchy to share access to records. A territory hierarchy grants users access to records based on
criteria such as zip code, industry, revenue, or a custom field that is relevant to your business. For example, you could create a
territory hierarchy in which a user with the “North America” role has access to different data than users with the “Canada” and
“United States” roles.
Note: Although it’s easy to confuse permission sets and profiles with roles, they control two very different things. Permission
sets and profiles control a user’s object and field access permissions. Roles primarily control a user’s record-level access
through role hierarchy and sharing rules.
• Sharing rules—Sharing rules let you make automatic exceptions to organization-wide sharing settings for particular sets of users,
to give them access to records they don’t own or can’t normally see. Sharing rules, like role hierarchies, are only used to give
additional users access to records—they can’t be stricter than your organization-wide default settings.
• Manual sharing—Sometimes it’s impossible to define a consistent group of users who need access to a particular set of records.
In those situations, record owners can use manual sharing to give read and edit permissions to users who would not have access
to the record any other way. Although manual sharing isn’t automated like organization-wide sharing settings, role hierarchies,
or sharing rules, it gives record owners the flexibility to share particular records with users that need to see them.
• Apex managed sharing—If sharing rules and manual sharing don’t give you the control you need, you can use Apex managed
sharing. Apex managed sharing allows developers to programmatically share custom objects. When you use Apex managed
sharing to share a custom object, only users with the “Modify All Data” permission can add or change the sharing on the custom
object's record, and the sharing access is maintained across record owner changes.
Auditing
Auditing features do not secure your organization by themselves, but these features provide information about usage of the system,
which can be critical in diagnosing potential or real security issues. It is important that someone in your organization perform regular
audits to detect potential abuse. The other security features provided by Salesforce are preventative. To verify that your system is actually
secure, you should perform audits to monitor for unexpected changes or usage trends.
Auditing features include:
Record Modification Fields
All objects include fields to store the name of the user who created the record and who last modified the record. This provides some
basic auditing information.
Login History
You can review a list of successful and failed login attempts to your organization for the past six months. See Monitoring Login
History on page 92.
Field History Tracking
You can also enable auditing for individual fields, which will automatically track any changes in the values of selected fields. Although
auditing is available for all custom objects, only some standard objects allow field-level auditing. See Tracking Field History on page
93.
Setup Audit Trail
Administrators can also view a Setup Audit Trail, which logs when modifications are made to your organization’s configuration. See
Monitoring Setup Changes on page 96.
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