To Keep Your CRM Data Secure, Establish a Digital Chain of Custody

Privacy and data protection regulations are reshaping how organizations must handle their customer data. Eighty percent of countries have laws like GDPR, DORA, CPRA, HIPAA, and APRA in place or pending. By the end of 2024, Gartner says, 75 percent of the world’s population will have its personal data covered under modern privacy regulations. 

Complying with these laws can be as difficult as it is critical. That’s because companies that rely on SaaS CRM applications like Salesforce don’t really own their data—and if you don’t own it, you can’t protect it or control how it’s used or accessed.

The Data Ownership Surprise

The truth is that data residing in SaaS applications—and, therefore, in the SaaS vendors’ infrastructure—is actually owned by those vendors. But because of the SaaS “shared responsibility” model, vendors are responsible for keeping their application up and running, not for protecting the data residing in their apps. 

In the SaaS world, data protection is the customer’s responsibility. This is hard when it’s not in their possession.

Even when app vendors, such as Salesforce, offer their own backup solution as an add-on, this is still a concern. That backup doesn’t enable the extent of protection companies need because their data is still in the vendor’s infrastructure. This means they have less control over who accesses their data and how it is used. It also exposes organizations to single vendor risks. For instance, if the vendor has an outage, not only isn’t the live CRM environment accessible, the backup data isn’t protected or accessible either. 

It’s also important to note that vendors like Salesforce don’t back up every single version of historical data—they’re limited to daily backups. In terms of data accessibility, they provide a single snapshot of current data. This can lead to critical data gaps.  

As a result, if there is a data breach, it’s harder to determine where and when the breach originated. It’s also very difficult to provide the chain of custody details needed for compliance audits and forensics. In addition, if a company’s employees mistakenly delete or change data—which is likely to happen with so many people using CRM apps on a daily basis—chances are you won’t be able to recover it. 

What Is a Digital Chain of Custody?

A digital chain of custody is the process of tracking and documenting every interaction with data within an organization. This includes who accessed the data, when it was accessed, where it was accessed from, and any changes made. 

Similar to the physical chain of custody used in legal contexts, a digital chain ensures data handling is transparent and traceable. This helps safeguard data from tampering and misuse.

How a Digital Chain of Custody Impacts Security and Compliance

Audit Trails

A digital chain of custody ensures comprehensive audit trails that log every interaction with data over time. Not only are these complete records of who accessed specific datasets, but they also capture timestamps, geographic locations, and actions taken such as modifications or deletions.  

Access Controls 

Digital chains of custody require stringent access controls, which are essential for safeguarding sensitive information. By leveraging advanced authentication methods, such as biometric recognition or multi-factor authentication, and role-based access permissions, they ensure only vetted personnel can interact with critical data. 

Incident Response and Forensics

By documenting every access point and alteration made to data, a digital chain of custody helps forensic experts quickly reconstruct the timeline of a breach, identifying how it transpired and which specific data was compromised. This not only expedites incident response and recovery, it can help contain the threat and prevent future incidents. 

This documentation also plays a critical role in legal proceedings. It provides incontrovertible evidence of data manipulation and unauthorized access. The ability to present a clear and detailed account of events can also strengthen a company’s position against potential lawsuits.

Compliance and Regulation Adherence

By systematically documenting all data interactions throughout its life cycle, a digital chain of custody makes ensuring compliance with data handling and privacy laws orders of magnitude easier. It provides the necessary proof that data was handled correctly, reducing the risk of non-compliance penalties. Having these records readily available also facilitates audits by regulatory bodies, while lessening the burden on IT organizations.  

Without full data ownership, however, it’s impossible to achieve a true chain of custody and the benefits it affords.

How to Ensure a Digital Chain of Custody

The question of how to ensure a digital chain of custody is really about how to ensure your company owns its data. The answer is relatively simple: by continuously backing up and replicating every single version of your CRM data, metadata, files, and objects directly from the vendor’s app into your own cloud instance, whether that’s AWS, GCP, Azure, or another cloud. This ensures not only that the data is independent from the CRM vendor but also separate from any backup vendor you use.

Data ownership also makes it easier to meet regulatory requirements through data archiving. With data in your own cloud instance, you have total control over retention periods and purging. Purging obsolete, stale, and old data is essential for adhering to data privacy regulations like GDPR and CPRA, as well as for protecting sensitive data from unauthorized access and for minimizing the impact of data breaches. For instance, deleting data that an organization no longer needs reduces the potential attack surface for cyber threats.

With data protection and privacy laws on the rise, and cyber attacks growing exponentially, ensuring a digital chain of custody is a must. Now is the time to consider the consequences of not owning your own CRM data—and take proactive steps to circumvent potentially devastating business impacts.

Joe Gaska is CEO and founder of GRAX, a Salesforce data protection leader. A serial entrepreneur, Gaska is passionate about leveraging historical SaaS data for business advantage and helping companies maximize data throughout its life cycle, from backup and recovery through archive and reuse.