Tag: Salesforce Page 5 of 24

Another guest post by Gilad David Maayan. Gilad is a technology writer who has worked with over 150 technology companies including SAP, Imperva, Samsung NEXT, NetApp and Check Point, producing technical and thought leadership content that elucidates technical solutions for developers and IT leadership. Today he heads Agile SEO, the leading marketing agency in the technology industry.

What Is CloudOps?

CloudOps is the practice of managing and optimizing cloud-based infrastructure and applications to ensure they operate reliably, securely, and efficiently. It involves the use of tools and processes to automate tasks such as provisioning, monitoring, scaling, and backup, which simplifies the management of cloud resources.

CloudOps professionals work to ensure that cloud environments meet business requirements and performance expectations. They collaborate with software development and IT teams to design and implement cloud-based solutions that align with organizational objectives.

CloudOps is critical for organizations looking to leverage the benefits of cloud computing, including scalability, flexibility, and cost savings. By implementing CloudOps, organizations can optimize cloud resources, reduce downtime, and improve overall performance.

The Core Principles of CloudOps

The pillars of CloudOps are a set of guiding principles and best practices that are essential for ensuring efficient and effective cloud operations. These include:

Automation: This is the foundation of CloudOps, enabling the rapid and consistent deployment and management of cloud resources. This includes automating processes such as provisioning, configuration, and scaling.
Monitoring: Visibility and monitoring are critical to ensure the health and performance of cloud resources. This includes monitoring for availability, performance, and security, and responding to issues quickly and proactively.
Cost optimization: Cloud resources can quickly become expensive if not managed properly. CloudOps focuses on optimizing costs by implementing strategies such as resource allocation and usage monitoring, rightsizing, and cost allocation.
Security: Securing the cloud workloads is a top priority for cloud operations. CloudOps professionals ensure that cloud environments are secure by implementing best practices such as identity and access management, network security, and encryption.
DevOps: CloudOps and DevOps are closely related, with CloudOps supporting the development and deployment of applications in the cloud. This involves collaboration between development and operations teams, and the implementation of agile practices to support continuous integration and delivery.

Why Is CloudOps Important in the Salesforce Environment?

CloudOps is important in any environment that uses cloud services, including the Salesforce environment. CloudOps is important in the Salesforce environment for several reasons:

Application performance: CloudOps is important for ensuring that Salesforce applications and services are performing optimally. By monitoring the performance of Salesforce applications, CloudOps teams can identify and address issues that could impact the user experience.
Scalability: Salesforce is a popular customer relationship management (CRM) platform used by organizations of all sizes. As a company grows and adds more customers, the demand on its Salesforce environment can increase. CloudOps teams can help ensure that the Salesforce environment can scale to meet demand, by adding more resources or making other adjustments as needed.
Security: CloudOps teams are responsible for ensuring the security of the Salesforce environment, including monitoring for threats and vulnerabilities, implementing security controls, and ensuring compliance with industry and regulatory standards.
Cost optimization: CloudOps teams can help organizations optimize the cost of their Salesforce environment by identifying ways to reduce costs without impacting performance or security. This can include adjusting resource usage, implementing automation, and leveraging cloud cost optimization tools.

CloudOps Best Practices for Your Salesforce Environment

Implementing CloudOps best practices in a Salesforce environment is important for ensuring optimal performance, scalability, security, and cost optimization. Here are some best practices to consider:

Use automation: Automation is a key component of CloudOps best practices. Automation can help reduce the time and effort required to manage the Salesforce environment, and can help ensure consistency and reliability. Some examples of automation in a Salesforce environment include automated deployments, automated backups, and automated testing.
Monitor performance: Monitoring the performance of the Salesforce environment is important for identifying and addressing issues that could impact the user experience. CloudOps teams can use performance monitoring tools to identify performance bottlenecks and other issues, and take steps to address them. Performance monitoring should include not only the Salesforce application itself, but also the underlying infrastructure, such as the database and network.
Ensure security: Security is a critical component of CloudOps best practices. CloudOps teams should implement security controls, such as access controls, encryption, and multi-factor authentication, to help protect the Salesforce environment from unauthorized access and data breaches. It is also important to monitor for threats and vulnerabilities, and to implement appropriate security measures to mitigate risks.
Optimize costs: Cost optimization is another important consideration in CloudOps. CloudOps teams should work to optimize the cost of the Salesforce environment by identifying ways to reduce costs without impacting performance or security. This can include adjusting resource usage, implementing automation, and leveraging cloud cost optimization tools.
Leverage DevOps practices: DevOps practices, such as continuous integration and continuous deployment, can help improve the speed and agility of Salesforce development and operations. By automating the deployment process and using automated testing, teams can accelerate the delivery of new features and fixes to the Salesforce environment, while reducing the risk of errors and downtime.
Implement disaster recovery: Disaster recovery is a critical component of CloudOps best practices. CloudOps teams should implement a disaster recovery plan for the Salesforce environment to ensure that critical data and applications can be restored in the event of a disaster or outage. This can include backing up data regularly, implementing failover mechanisms, and testing the disaster recovery plan regularly.
Implement change management: Change management is important for ensuring that changes to the Salesforce environment are implemented in a controlled and predictable manner. CloudOps teams should implement a change management process that includes testing, approval, and documentation of changes, to ensure that changes are implemented without causing unexpected issues.

Conclusion

CloudOps best practices are essential for ensuring efficient and effective management of a Salesforce environment. By implementing automation, monitoring performance, ensuring security, optimizing costs, leveraging DevOps, implementing disaster recovery, and implementing change management, organizations can ensure that their Salesforce environment is reliable, scalable, secure, and cost-effective.

CloudOps enables organizations to leverage the benefits of the Salesforce platform while reducing the risk of errors and downtime. By adopting best practices for CloudOps, organizations can improve productivity, enhance customer satisfaction, and gain a competitive advantage.

[MadeInItaly] Salesforce Productivity Burst for VSCode

By Raffaele Preziosi

On March 24, 2023

In Post

For the #MadeInItaly series where I want to showcase amazing artisanal Italian products from our incredible Italian Ohana, today’s guest post is delivered by Raffaele Preziosi, a certified Salesforce Developer and Application Architect who was born in Naples (Italy). He is passionate about the Salesforce platform, JavaScript, and DevOps. Currently, he works as a consultant at Accenture Nordics in Copenhagen, where he continues to innovate and develop solutions for clients in the Salesforce ecosystem.

Productivity is key when working with complex systems like Salesforce and installing the right tools can significantly increase it.

Salesforce Productivity Burst is a Visual Studio Code extension that can boost the productivity of Salesforce developers by streamlining their workflow.

The most interesting feature of this extension is the ability to open a wide range of Salesforce metadata types directly from VSCode, without the need to navigate the Salesforce user interface. This feature can save developers and admins a lot of time during the working day.

To use this feature, simply install it (Salesforce Productivity Burst – Visual Studio Marketplace), open the XML metadata component file and click the search icon in the status bar.

The extension operates by querying the metadata to retrieve the necessary ID, which will be used to generate the final URL. To improve the extension’s responsiveness, data is cached in the .sfdx/tools/SPB folder. By running the SPB:Refresh Metadata command, all required data can be pre-cached, resulting in significantly faster access to the components in subsequent operations.

It currently supports the following metadata types: Flow, Fields, Layouts, Profiles, Validation Rules, Global Picklists, Lightning Pages, Permission Sets, Permission Set Groups, Apex Classes, Apex Triggers, Quick Actions and Approval Processes.

In addition to this feature, SPB offers the ability to get total coverage and single-method test coverage of Apex classes/triggers, similar to what is available in the developer console. It also allows for quick activation of debug logging for your user, automated process, or integration platform user.

Quick Guide to Salesforce Firewall Configuration

By Gilad David Maayan

On January 9, 2023

In Post

Today’s guest post is delivered by Gilad David Maayan, a technology writer who has worked with over 150 technology companies including SAP, Samsung NEXT, NetApp and Imperva, producing technical and thought leadership content that elucidates technical solutions for developers and IT leadership.

What is eCDN Web Application Firewall?

Salesforce Commerce Cloud provides a built-in content delivery network called eCDN, designed to accelerate site access and content delivery. It provides a safer and more reliable online shopping experience.

The eCDN also includes a web application firewall (WAF). Unlike a network firewall that inspects network traffic and blocks attacks at the network level, a WAF can protect application-layer traffic from web security threats and common web application vulnerabilities. For example, WAFs can protect against SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and cross-site request forgery (CSRF). The WAF is automatically updated with new rules and attack patterns to stay ahead of evolving threats.

How Does eCDN WAF Work?

eCDN WAF looks at all interactions with merchant websites—legitimate shopper behavior, bot traffic, and potentially malicious requests. All requests to the storefront are made over HTTP/S or AJAX. The WAF scrutinizes all requests, identifying common patterns of legitimate web traffic and possible attack patterns, and filtering out malicious traffic. The WAF can identify unusual or malicious traffic and block it to prevent security threats from reaching the eCommerce server. eCDN WAF also inspects website addresses and URLs to detect anomalies like malicious redirects.

When a suspicious request is made to a merchant’s site, the eCDN WAF evaluates the request and applies the action configured by the merchant:

If the selected action is “challenge”—the suspicious user is presented with a CAPTCHA and must submit it successfully to proceed to the next page. If the user does not successfully complete the CAPTCHA, the WAF blocks the request before it reaches the Commerce Cloud.
If the selected action is “block”—the suspicious user is immediately blocked.

Merchants can manage eCDN WAF in the Business Manager interface. They can configure WAF and access logs, and define how tightly their security settings should be enforced by setting the WAF to low, medium, or high security. WAF configuration is individual to each merchant site and depends on the type of traffic a website receives, and the level risk tolerance for the merchant’s business operations

A lower setting might be appropriate if a brand uses bots, or accepts the use of certain types of bots, which might trigger the WAF too frequently.

eCDN WAF Modes of Operation

When responding to potential web application threats, eCDN WAF inspects each incoming request, assigns a threat score, and responds appropriately. The WAF uses OWASP definitions to detect common web application attacks. Each incoming request that triggers an OWASP rule increases the overall threat score.

WAF uses three modes of operation to respond to detected OWASP threats:

Simulate—logs events without blocking or requiring web requests. This option allows administrators to see the impact of the WAF in challenge or block mode and decide which mode of operation is best for their online store.
Challenge—when challenge mode is enabled, suspected malicious users must fill in a CAPTCHA before accessing the store. Challenge mode is useful when there is a risk the WAF might accidentally target legitimate shoppers. Challenge mode allows a legitimate user to enter CAPTCHA information and continue their shopping experience.
Block—if an incoming web request is suspicious, a blocked page is displayed and the web request is prevented from reaching the server. The block option is the most effective against threat actors. However, this option is also the most restrictive. If the WAF incorrectly identifies a real shopper as malicious, the shopper is blocked and cannot enter the store.

Working with Simulation Mode

If you are new to WAF, SalesForce recommends running WAF in simulation mode for at least one week. Simulation mode captures and records information about site traffic.

You can review the generated logs to make data-driven decisions about firewall requirements and decide how to best configure the WAF. When reviewing logs, consider the following:

Which rules are triggered and how often are they executed?
Which region triggered the rule, and do you sell to or ship to this country?
Which IP addresses are associated with suspicious requests identified by WAF rules? Doing an IP lookup of a suspected malicious IP address can reveal more information.

After rtunning the WAF in simulation mode, you can decide whether to increase the sensitivity level of the WAF (if you see real threat actors are identified as malicious). Alternatively, you can reduce the sensitivity of the WAF (if you see there are real shoppers wrongly identified as malicious).

Modify eCDN WAF Settings

To change eCDN WAF settings:

Choose Administration > Sites > Embedded CDN Settings.
Choose a zone.
On the WAF tab, select Enabled to turn on the WAF for the zone, or deselect it to disable WAF for this zone.
From the Action dropdown list, select the action to take when an anomalous request is discovered—Simulate, Challenge, or Block.
From the Sensitivity drop down, select a sensitivity level—high, medium, or low.

To obtain log data for analysis:

Select one or more dates and times and click Request Log. An email with a link is sent to your Business Manager email account when the log file is available for download. Download the logs to analyze your traffic and adjust WAF sensitivity accordingly.

Conclusion

In conclusion, configuring the Salesforce firewall is an important step in ensuring the security and integrity of your Salesforce account. By following the steps outlined in this quick guide, you can effectively set up and manage your firewall to protect your account from external threats and unauthorized access. It is also important to regularly review and update your firewall configuration to ensure it remains effective in protecting your account and data. By taking the time to properly set up and maintain your Salesforce firewall, you can ensure the security and success of your business.

TrailblazerDX 2023 registration open! 🤓

By Enrico Murru

On December 21, 2022

In Announcement

Are you ready for 2 full immersion days of Salesforce tech learning in beautiful San Francisco? 😮

If you, an admi/dev/architect, are looking for some real epicness, be ready for:

200+ technical sessions
400+ experts from Salesforce, MuleSoft, Slack, and Tableau
Knowledge share from thousands professionals
Parties, fun, parties, and fun

By registering now, you’ll get a $ 400 discount.

👉Click here for more details

Get a glimpse of the awesomeness with this recap of TrailblazerDX 22.

ORGanizer Connector: create your personal Salesforce credentials hub! 🎯

By Enrico Murru

On December 20, 2022

In Announcement

📣 It’s with great pleasure that I’m announcing that ORGanizer Connector has successfully passed the AppExchange security review and ~~it will soon be publicly listed~~ it’s just been publicly listed!

What’s ORGanizer Connector?

ORGanizer Connector is a free AppExchange app that can be freely installed on any org type (production, sandbox or developer edition).

The app usage is really simple:

manually create Backup records that contains one or more credentials (Backup Items) whose secrets (password and token) are encrypted with a key stored in the main Backup record (which only who has access to the record can get)

massively import ORGanizer for Salesforce backups to automatically create Backup records using ORGanizer for Salesforce backup files

Each Backup can be shared using Salesforce standard sharing model, so org users can see only the record they are allowed to access and nothing more (we suggest a Private sharing model extended with sharing rules or manual sharing)
The package exposes a couple of REST APIs to let external applications integrate
- By having access to a Backup record, you can use the Send Secret by Email button to receive the encryption secret by mail: this secret will be used to decrypt the secrets using the Reveal Password & Token button on the Backup Item record or using the ORGanizer for Salesforce native integration (for Full PRO and Team users only), or creating your own integration following the Github repo example

Is it really free?

The app is absolutely free 👌

If you want to use the ORGanizer for Salesforce native integration you need a Full PRO or Team license, though, but for companies it can be a life saver!

How do you use ORGanizer Connector integration?

It’s easy as 1,2,3:

Install the package on your org (👉 AppExchange Link)
Open the Options page (right click on ORGanizer icon and select Options)
Select the Import/Export tab
In the ORGanizer Connector (PRO) section select a connection (i.e. a login already stored on ORGanizer that lets you login to the org where ORGanizer Connector is installed…I suggest using an OAuth login)
- Provided org can be a production org, a sandbox org or a Developer Edition org, no limitations!
Select a Backup record and click the Get Backup button
- Remember: you need to get the Backup’s Secret using the Send Secret by Email button on the Backup record
Select the logins you want to be loaded into ORGanizer for Salesforce extension
Select a login group already on your extension or create a new one and click the Import Logins button
- If you import a login that is already on ORGanizer (username is the unique key) the login will simply be updated with the new passoword and token

Have a look at the video below to have a glimpse of how simple is ORGanizer for Salesforce’s Connector user experience:

When will ORGanizer Connector be available to install from AppExchange?

UPDATE: The package has just been listed and is available from this 🔗 AppExchange link.

We hope to be ready to publish the listing within Christmas 2022 alogn with an updated version of ORGanizer for Salesforce extension that will enable the native integration for PRO users.

What if I need more details?

Contact me:

📣DevOps Center is now Generally Available!

By Enrico Murru

On December 16, 2022

In Post

Finally this amazing tool is GA!

DevOps Center is IMHO one of the most anticipated tools that we, the community of Salesforce professionals, were waiting since ages 👴

This gap has been filled in the years by many amazing products like Copado, Flosum, Gearset, AutoRABIT, Blue Canvas, Prodly or Opsera to name a few, but finally a Salesforce branded tool has just born to overcome many of the difficulties with Change Sets.

DevOps Center is a valid alternative to organize your work, track changes automatically, integrate seamlessly with GitHub (other GIT providers coming soon), and deploy updates easily with clicks: developers who are used to work on Git can still go on with it as DevOps center automatically updates its UI based on Git activity and admins can still participate in tracking changes on Git using clicks and not command line.

DevOps Center is available in any production org with Professional, Enterprise, or Unlimited Edition, or a Developer Edition org…so you can get your hands dirty!

Take a look at Salesforce Developers official blog for more links on how to learn!

💬Virtual chit-chat about being an MVP and the future of Salesforce [ITA]

By Enrico Murru

On December 13, 2022

In Post

Few days ago I’ve been interviewed by Carlo De Bonis for his Spaghetti Salesforce vlog (in Italian 🍕🍝).

We talked about my career path, what being a Salesforce MVP means and what I believe our amazing Trailblazer Community and Salesforce ecosystem will evolve in the next years.

Have a nice view!

Salesfore Spring ’23 coming!

By Enrico Murru

On December 12, 2022

In Post

This is the time of the year when a new release is about to arise from the epic forges of the Salesforce laboratories, where magic spells and powerful artifacts are built!

Here are the key dates to be considered:

December 12nd: you can get your own pre-release org to test the new features (use this link)
December 21st: release notes will be available on the help site(use this link)
January 6th: preview sandboxes gets the new release (for more info about how to handle sandboxes previews have a loog at this site)
The same days new Trailhead content will be published to handle your certification maintenance
January 10th: overview content is released to have a sneak peek of what’s new (e.g. have a look at the release in the box site, but the Get Ready for Release chapter on the release note should have all the links)
January 13rd, February 3rd, February 7th: Spring ’23 comes to all orgs, check the maintenance calendar to see which instances comes first!