“Security First” Isn’t a Slogan — It’s a Backlog Policy

When headlines say “Salesforce customer data leaked,” it’s tempting to hunt for a single root cause. The recent campaigns tell a different story: not a platform flaw, but compromised integrations, OAuth tokens, and misconfiguration turned into wide doors. Various customers saw data posted after extortion deadlines. The lesson is old but urgent: your SaaS is as strong as your least-governed connection. 

A philosophical shift: from “features first” to “risk-balanced”

Product backlogs skew toward revenue and efficiency. That’s rational—until an incident wipes out a quarter’s worth of trust. Security work is often framed as a tax; treat it instead as compound interest. Every sprint without it accrues debt across people, process, and integrations.

Policy recommendation: earmark 10–20% of every sprint for security posture work—always on, not just after a scare. Think of it as the rent you pay for operating in the cloud.

What goes in that 10–20%

• Continuous audit: connected apps, OAuth scopes, IP allowlists, high-risk profiles/perm sets, public links, community/guest exposure.

• Least privilege & drift control: shrink “god” perms, rotate secrets/tokens, remove orphaned integrations, enforce MFA/SSO policy symmetry.

• Detection & response plumbing: Event Monitoring, anomaly alerts, export to SIEM, playbooks for token revocation and user offboarding.

• Data minimization: reduce PII in non-prod, scrub attachments, tokenize where possible.

• Tabletop tests: simulate OAuth theft and third-party compromise; measure mean time to revoke and recover.

Why now?

• Adversary playbook matured: phishing + help-desk social engineering + “please approve this integration” works at scale. OAuth bypasses MFA if the token is already granted.

• SaaS sprawl: dozens of connected apps, many with broad scopes, created for experiments that outlive their owners.

• Misconfiguration remains common: simple settings can expose links or files beyond intended audiences.

Pragmatic tools and tactics

• "Power User Toolkit" (available on AppExchange): use the PII analysis feature to scan for sensitive fields and surface priority objects (e.g., Case, Contact, Lead, custom intake objects). Map high-risk data to the integrations that touch it; that matrix becomes your sprint-by-sprint guide for hardening.

• Zero-trust for integrations: name owners for every Connected App; rotate keys quarterly; restrict refresh token policies; kill unused tokens weekly.

• Guardrail Flows: auto-quarantine records/attachments with detected PII patterns; alert Security via Platform Events.

• Golden paths: pre-approved integration patterns with least-privilege scopes and automated reviews.

A note on accountability

Backlog percentage is easy to promise and easy to erode. Make it visible: a dashboard that shows security burn-down, token age distribution, count of high-scope apps, and time-to-revoke in drills. Tie it to OKRs, not ad hoc willpower.

---

Incidents this year were a reminder: it wasn’t the CRM’s core—it's the ecosystem. Bake a permanent 10–20% security allocation into your backlog to audit, reduce blast radius, and practice response. That’s how you buy down risk while shipping value.