Data Security breaches are flooding the news and the costs of these incidents worldwide are running in the trillions of dollars. The reputation of companies was severely damaged overnight by breaking their customers, business partners and employees trust in case of an incident. Most importantly, the personal suffering that arises from being the victim of cybercrime can have a huge negative impact on our lives.
One of the main reasons for the enormous increase in data security breaches is the domination of cloud based platforms in the enterprise software market. We cannot hold these cloud suppliers accountable for all that goes wrong though: security is a shared responsibility. When a software company stores your password securely somewhere on their servers, it is also your responsibility to make sure this password cannot be retrieved (… from that post-it on your monitor …).
Salesforce announced that, as of February 1, 2022, they will begin requiring customers to enable multi-factor authentication in order to access Salesforce products. Multi-factor authentication is one of the measures that can be taken to protect the data in your company.
Salesforce appeals to your shared responsibility: the functionality of their multi-factor authentication is solid, available at no extra cost and is easily configured, but it is the task of your company to decide on the use of authenticator apps, bring your own device policies, hardware keys and possibly (re)configure single sign-on. 2022 might look like a distant future, but discussions around security should not be postponed and be brought to managers attention as soon as possible.. Acting now will help save a lot of headache next February.