All About Salesforce Health Check 101

If you are a Salesforce admin, your major worry must be security. You will be extra cautious as you are handling customer data and yes, you need to be.

The best way to stay on top of your CRM maintenance is to do regular Salesforce Health Checks. In this blog, we will cover what is a Health check, Its importance, and how to do it.

Importance of Salesforce Health Check

You have come a long way in keeping your customers happy if you purchased and implemented a tool like Salesforce. But after doing all this, you don’t want to compromise data and lose your reputation. Salesforce is one of the most-secured platforms in the market, but there are still few settings that need to be configured by admins like you to maintain it.

1. Post-implementation of Salesforce, you need to do regular health checks to ensure that the processes are working fine and error-free. Also, if this is done on a regular basis it would improve your team’s productivity, system efficiency.
2. They say prevention is better than cure. Proactively Identifying the security risks/vulnerabilities in your system will help you fix/reduce risks.
3. Last but not the least, you need to keep up with your competitors and industry standards right? Salesforce Health Check lets you do it.

At CloudIdeas, we offer a tailored Health Check service, which is ideal for businesses of any size. We work along with you to understand your pain points and set Salesforce-specific goals. Our experienced Salesforce consultants will provide a detailed analysis of your current Salesforce state along with a list of performance enhancements in just 2-3 days.

Having said that, we will dig into the DIY approach of Salesforce Health Check as well.

Basics of Salesforce Health Check

The Health Check tool compares the health of your Salesforce org against the Salesforce Industry standards and gives you a summary score. You could find vulnerabilities and fix the settings immediately, once you run the health check.

As and when you change the settings to be more restrictive and secure, your score increases in the Health Check tool. Eg: If the password policy is changed from Default to lesser characters, then the score decreases and vice versa.

Don't forget to check out: Why Is Salesforce Training Worth Your Time and Money?

User Permission for running Health Check

Before you get started with the Salesforce Health check, have this in mind - you need to have user permissions for running the check, comparing with the base standards or baseline.

Health Check Initial Setup

You could do this from Setup -> Quick Find -> Type Health Check

1 - Here you could choose the Standard Baseline or create a custom one from the drop-down based on your business and its needs. The baseline will have set values for Informational Security and Low, Medium, High-Risk Settings.

2 - If you alter the settings to be less restrictive than the baseline (marked as 5) then the health check score (marked as 3) and grade (marked as 4) reduces accordingly you could edit the settings (marked as 6) or Use fix risks (marked as 7).

3 - You could import, export, edit, or delete a custom baseline within the baseline control menu 

Here’s a video that will take you through the steps involved in improving the health score. It’s just an example to get you started.

Health Check Score Calculation

The health score is calculated based on a formula and it increases when your settings comply more with the standards. There are four risk categories - High, Medium, Low, and Informational that will affect the health score.

If these settings meet or exceed the standards, then the score is 100%. The grade mentioned in Health Check is again based on the score.

Salesforce recommends you take immediate action(reduce risks) if your Health Check score is 33% or less. If your health score is between 34 and 66%, then you need to fix High Risks in the short term and the rest in the long term. If it’s 67% and above, you could review your health check on a regular basis to reduce risks.

You could get a list of risk settings here.

Custom Baseline

You could import a custom baseline so that you can compare the security settings of your firm to that of standards custom created by you.  What you could also do is amend the existing settings and compare those with your org’s settings too.

At any stage, you could export the standard baseline files from the base and control menu to get an idea of how baseline files look like.

XML Files and Tools API

If you are a Salesforce Developer, you must be familiar with APIs.  With the Tooling API, you could get your company’s security settings, health check scores, and Salesforce baseline settings.

This could be used by you to pull data or integrate with your central Security system. You could also build reports/dashboards and monitor security constantly.

Check out another amazing blog by Cloudideas here: Salesforce Introduces Einstein Automate

Final Thoughts

Maintaining Salesforce, keeping it secure is not like a sprint, it’s a marathon. As the digital world is changing at a rocket speed, there are always increased chances for security mishaps too.

The best bet for companies like yours and admins like you is to be prepared. With the Cloudideas Health check package, you could turn your messy Salesforce settings to secure one in 2-3 days. You could get started with one of our packages.