Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, Josh Birk talks to Jagan Nathan, Technical Architect with Customer Success at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about guest user anomalies and what you can do about them with the Threat Detection app.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jagan Nathan.

The most important thing for a successful Data Cloud migration

Jagan works as a Technical Architect with the Customer Success Group at Salesforce. He’s focused on helping businesses use Data Cloud to de-silo their data so they can get a full picture of their customers.

Jagan estimates that 60-70% of the time you spend on a Data Cloud migration is used to make sure you understand what needs to be done. That’s because the most important decisions are around what objects and data sources you want to map and how it all fits together. If you need help getting started, his team has put together the Data Cloud Workbook Template to walk you through everything.

What is a guest user anomaly and why is it dangerous for your data security?

The biggest security issues Jagan encounters in orgs come from changes made to profiles and permissions over time. All those consultants can begin to add up! At some point, you need to do an audit of who can see what and apply the principle of least privilege.

And that’s the reason we brought Jagan on the pod, because one way this can happen is through something called a guest user anomaly. Essentially, it’s when a guest user account has more access than it otherwise than it should. For example, an Apex class that allows them pull all of your data. It’s the kind of thing that’s difficult to identify but can leave you primed for a data breach if you don’t know about it.

How the Threat Detection app can help you identify guest user anomalies

The good news is that there’s something you can do about guest user anomalies. If your org has Event Monitoring, you can use the Threat Detection app to identify problematic accounts and take action. It uses the power of machine learning to figure out where the gaps are in your permissions and flag them for you.

In fact, the Threat Detection app can help you monitor all sorts of other anomalies, too. Like if a user who does their reports in the same time window each week suddenly logs in at 3 a.m. to pull a bunch of data, or someone based in Albuquerque logs in from Finland. It can even monitor your APIs. And the best part is that enabling Threat Detection is as easy as turning on the permission set.

Jagan gets into more specifics in our interview, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

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Salesforce Security Guide: Threat Detection
Salesforce Security Guide: Guest User Anomaly
Salesforce Help: Best Practices for Investigating Guest User Anomalies
Trailhead: Get Started with Event Monitoring

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Full show transcript

Josh Birk: Hello Admins, it's your guest host Josh Birk here. Today, I'm going to welcome Jagan Nathan to talk about some very specific things about security, specifically quirks in security that can sometimes be a little difficult to detect and how we're going to help you detect them. So without further ado, let's go to Jagan. All right. Today on the show we welcome Jagan. Did I do that right, Jagan?

Jagan Nathan : Yes.

Josh Birk: All right. We're going to talk about some very interesting security things, but first of all, welcome to the show.

Jagan Nathan : Thank you, once again, for having me.

Josh Birk: Thanks. All right, well, let's start, once again, in some of your early years. How did you originally get into computing?

Jagan Nathan : Oh, yeah. So back then during school days, we used to play Counter-Strike. We have in-house network connected with a group of friends.

Josh Birk: Nice.

Jagan Nathan : So that is how we started into it. We started in a playful mode and then we slowly started programming and all those aspects to it.

Josh Birk: Did you actually get into modding Half-Life and all that stuff?

Jagan Nathan : Not really.

Josh Birk: Got it. Nice. How did you originally get involved with Salesforce?

Jagan Nathan : Salesforce, initially I got trained in the Java platform and then back then we got a new project on Salesforce and we have been asked if we could try this out and then I initially thought of giving it a try. I initially thought Salesforce is purely sales driven or some sort of MBA-related work, but that is how it was. And then slowly I got into it. It was quite interesting. And then back then it was even more interesting without Trailhead. We had a lot of learnings. We used to push in developer forums. It was quite challenging and interesting. From that point of time, there's no looking back. We just love this platform.

Josh Birk: Nice. How did you find the transition from Java to Apex?

Jagan Nathan : So I was able to correlate most of our things through the basic modules. I usually compare Java-related world with Salesforce Apex related, so that it was easy for me during the transition phase.

Josh Birk: Got it. And how would you describe your current job?

Jagan Nathan : So current job is more of a technical architect part of customer success group. Work with different set of customers. Each customers have their own set of challenges and problems to be solved. So right now I'm even focusing on the Data Cloud related piece of it. Try to stitch in the data from multiple data source what customer is having. They have a lot of silos data across the platform. We are using the power of Data Cloud to bring in and harmonize all those data.

Josh Birk: Got it. I feel like that's a very common thing at the company right now. So welcome to the club. Just as on that topic itself, especially when it comes to Admins, are you finding any particular specific challenges that run into when they start adopting Data Cloud?

Jagan Nathan : Our Data Cloud, the best part is we at Salesforce, we have a template called Data Cloud Workbook Template, which is mainly recommended for all the admins and then whoever is trying to configure Data Cloud. So Data Cloud, what we have seen so far is 60 to 70 percentage of time we need to spend on understanding what needs to be done, like what objects we're going to map, what are the data sources we're going to map. So we have a pretty good decent template out there called Data Cloud Workbook Template, which is highly recommended for our customers so that they spend a lot of time on what needs to be done, what fields needs to be mapped, what should be the data sources. So once we have that in place, admin life looks even more simple.

Josh Birk: Got it. Nice. And I think I'm going to ask this in the right way because I believe I don't know the answer, but since we're talking about security today, does Data Cloud offer any new thoughts on what to be concerned with security, or does it just kind of bolt itself on the platform and the platform is taking care of security like it normally would?

Jagan Nathan : Yes. So Data Cloud currently supports our data spaces. We have this concept called data space filters through which we can set up the security of it so that authorized users can access a particular set of data instead of accessing al...

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