Encrypting your data and protecting your users

Encryption is a form of digital security that scrambles transmitted and stored data. This scrambled data can only be unscrambled with a specific digital key. This is a practice known as cryptography. The practice of encrypting your data prevents unauthorized access to sensitive data from both internal users and external users, as you can set who or what has access to the key that decrypts data. Encryption is useful not only for preventing leaks but also for keeping your users from seeing sensitive data such as Social Security numbers or credit card information.

The most common categorizations you will hear about relative to Salesforce will be data encryption and database encryption, both of which come into play in Salesforce. Data encryption is largely focused on specific records and API messages during transmission, whereas database encryption is concerned with protecting entire objects or fields. While all Salesforce data has some...