How to Check a Cloud Vendor’s Technical Security Measures Are Adequate?

Just as a building requires proper physical security measures in place, such as doors made of sturdy materials and having appropriate types of locks; for technical infrastructure – a vendor needs to deploy extremely well secured technical security measures that are built in, configured, or implemented appropriately. You may actually think of cloud vendor’s technical infrastructure, comprising of – servers, network, platform, databases, and applications, equivalent to a building.

If the vendor deploys secure configuration guidance to secure the commonly used infrastructure component, proactive updating of products to patch security holes and other vulnerabilities as they are identified is a must. However, if the vendor, for differentiating itself from the competitors, uses less common components, check that the vendor’s staff has the technical security expertise to ensure that a secure configuration was developed.

To ensure the security of the infrastructure, evaluating the testing and approval of changes is also important. So once infrastructure is 100% secured, vendors need to ensure that changes to its components and configuration don’t open up other security loopholes.

For that purpose, policies and procedures the vendor has in place to manage changes should be evaluated, including the need for a required change to the extent that actual programming or configuration change is determined and check if the change is tested before it is moved into the production environment to ensure that it doesn’t impact operations or security.

And if programming is involved, the best practice is that programmers don’t have direct access to the production environment — this ensures that they can’t sneak in any changes without proper testing and authorization.

Alternatively, you may do the following:

• Avail cloud services from major vendors as these are mostly secure. You may check the published descriptions of their management processes and technical measures.
• Use Cloud Security Alliance, a framework that encourages vendors to adopt publishing security information
• Ask your vendor for a Service Organization Controls (SOC) report covering security and privacy.

All You Need To Know About Salesforce Community Cloud

Community Cloud is a salesforce.com initiative and it is how they want to move beyond just sales. As its name suggests, Community Cloud, is designed to connect you with more and more communities related to your business. It connects your customers, partners, and employees directly to the information, apps, and experts they need. In fact, it addresses every specific business need incorporating social concepts in service of sales, support, and partner collaboration. So if you want to tap into communities as part of your business strategy, keep a close watch on the following offerings of the Community Cloud.

Social Engagement  

Salesforce did not address these social and collaborative dimensions initially. But like many other CRM vendors, it wanted to offer some of that functionality to its customers. Later, having realized the significance of social channels for commerce activity and in combating competition, it introduced Community Cloud.

As Community Cloud came into being, it gradually turned into an effervescent community facilitating engagement for customers, business-to-business partners, and employees.

It helped businesses create self-service communities in order to streamline support and foster brand advocates among customers. For this purpose, it appointed service representatives for monitoring the community discussions and had provisions of escalation to the customer service team within Salesforce.com, if matters/queries etc. remain unattended.

Next, the Community Cloud proves useful in improving communications with vendors, creative agencies or alike to facilitate business operations/working.

Personalized Experience, Customization and Branding

Personalizing the community experience gives businesses an added opportunity to enhance existing customer relationships and customization helps them reflect their brand and extend online customer experience. With Community Cloud, it is now possible to create a fantastic, easy-to-use environment that will serve like an interactive extension of the brand.

Community Cloud also help build communities business can use as a platform to ensure that their customers get quick access to the most useful and/or relevant information. And for those customers who become active in the community, it recognizes and rewards with customizable badges that appear in the feed and on their profile. It is also possible, via Community Cloud, to offer

• connections to experts, groups;
• content based on individual interests and behavior;
• endorsing others for specific skills and expertise

For branding, it also helps to create loyal brand advocates who can lessen the support burden on a customer service team by responding to user questions within the community, and their active engagement on behalf of the business can also positively affect the image of the brand.

At a glance, every prospective customers who visit a business’s community can see that the support team is proactive at providing high-quality customer care and meeting its customers’ needs. Since much of this customer service typically is done behind the scenes, it extends into the public community thereby increasing positive perceptions of the brand.

Business Integration: Info & Data

Cloud Community gets you access to all the requisite information (that is also relevant about the topic) in one place. Automatically generated topic pages gather files, discussions, groups and experts into a single page so that all the vital information is easily organized and accessed. Users can even follow specific topics to remain up to date on novice, relevant conversations in the community.

Accordingly, it fetches data (from everywhere) for the communities so that all the members of the community can create and update records and processes. While partners can update opportunities or qualify leads, employees can escalate customer support cases and customers can provide product feedback. Community Cloud offers a rich, branded, and device-responsive mobile experience anywhere. It’s action-oriented and provides mobility, speed and sync across devices.

Conclusion

Salesforce has earned the trust of its customers worldwide. With Community Cloud, they shall have access to the most sensitive processes and data. But as it is a secure, reliable, and scalable platform, it shall make collaboration quite easy and meet the growing needs of every business community.