Real-Time Anomaly Detection for Your Salesforce Landscape
New AI innovations empower Salesforce managers to find and act on security concerns.
About Miro
I’m Miro, a data scientist at Valo, where I focus on uncovering insights in Salesforce environments. With experience in anomaly detection from both cloud platforms and mobile networks, I take a holistic approach to solving problems and love exploring new ways to analyze data. Outside of work, I’m an outdoorsy and sporty person, especially passionate about basketball, both on and off the court.
Security risks of Salesforce application integrations
Integrations with the many business applications you need make up the backbone of a powerful Salesforce setup, but they can also be your biggest security blind spot. Even with strong internal security practices, a breach or compromise in a third-party integration can put your data at risk. Misconfigured permissions or compromised OAuth tokens grant attackers unauthorized access to your Salesforce environment and disguise malicious intent as legitimate activity.
Think about the tools you’ve connected — HubSpot, DocuSign, Zapier, Slack, or Power BI. If one is breached, your entire Salesforce landscape could be at risk. These integrations, often overlooked in the security process, can easily become weak points if not given the same level of attention.
Non-Humans in Salesforce
Just as monitoring human user activity is essential for security, non-human access through integrations should be held to the same standard. These risks highlight why real-time monitoring of Salesforce integrations is critical to detect and respond to threats before they escalate.
In this post, we’ll uncover the hidden dangers of Salesforce integrations, including non-human identities (NHI), and show you how to safeguard your environment before a security lapse turns into a crisis.
Real-time Salesforce anomaly detection
The process of monitoring data and identifying unusual events is a dedicated field of research, often referred to as anomaly detection. In your Salesforce environment, automatically flagging irregularities or unusual integration activity with anomaly detection can provide a proactive way to ensure security.
To ensure the integrity of your Salesforce landscape, it's crucial to closely monitor integrations, tracking every API call and login event in real time. Anomaly detection is key to identifying deviations from the norm, allowing you to learn what "normal" behavior looks like for each integration. By combining heuristic, statistical, and machine learning techniques to analyze patterns — such as how often an integration makes requests or where and when logins occur — you can establish a tailored baseline of expected activity for each integration. When an activity noticeably deviates from these baselines, it is identified as an anomaly. Whether it’s an integration flooding your system with API calls, logins from unfamiliar locations, or accessing sensitive data for the first time, these anomalies can be flagged instantly, keeping your Salesforce environment secure.
For newly connected integrations, building a concept of “normal” may be challenging, as the learning period needs to be long enough to observe varied behavior. Ideally, this period should extend over several months, to capture seasonal or irregular patterns, but even one week might provide enough insight to start detecting anomalies. In the meantime, other critical aspects can still be monitored to alert on connections to recently breached or low-reputation services, highlight insecure authentication methods, and identify misconfigurations or suboptimal settings in your Salesforce org — ensuring a secure and optimized setup.
Once abnormal behavior is detected in an integration, swift actions can be taken, such as revoking OAuth tokens to immediately deny access and minimize potential damage to your Salesforce environment.
How does Valo help?
Integrations are vital to your Salesforce setup, but can be overlooked security risks. What if an AI-powered security agent could automatically monitor, detect, and respond to anomalies in real-time? Valo does exactly that for your Salesforce landscape and dozens of connected applications. It continuously tracks integration activity, flags suspicious behavior, and helps secure your Salesforce environment - automatically. Let Valo handle the security, so you can focus on creating business value and have peace of mind that powerful agents are watching your integrations to continually protect your data.
Take control of your Salesforce security. Start monitoring your connections today - before threats become breaches.
https://www.valo.ai/request-trial
Miro-Markus Nikula