Blog
October 14, 2025
How to Choose the Right Tool for Masking Salesforce Data
Data Management,
Security & Compliance
At most businesses, Salesforce data is the centerpiece of the customer record. With increasing cyber security threats and data breaches, this data (which often contains critical PII data) can also be a big compliance and privacy risk. And the stakes have never been higher. According to the 2025 State of Data Compliance and Security Report, 60% of organizations experienced data breaches or theft in non-production environments in the past year — an 11% increase from 2024.
Companies rely on Salesforce data to test applications and provide their customers with new innovations to grow their business. As a result, many people across a business need access to Salesforce data and sandboxes. External consultants are brought in to build out complex Salesforce functions. Analysts require it for BI purposes. Salesforce developers need to validate that new processes function. QA testers need to check that a form going live to all customers works. Application developers across the org need to use it in a range of applications.
Test data management and security professionals need strong masking solutions to safeguard this data. Having worked with hundreds of companies to solve this type of problem, we put together a quick guide to help you with what to look for when selecting a Salesforce masking solution.
What Is Salesforce Data Masking?
Salesforce data masking renders data useless to those who may get their hands on a customer’s sensitive data while maintaining the inherent value of the data itself. It’s a proven method to obfuscate data in test environments.
Masking tools replace real data with fake yet realistic values, for use in testing, demos, or analytics. Such solutions change the values of the data but maintain the integrity of the real data itself. Algorithms are used to alter this data in ways that cannot be reverse-engineered. By masking data, you can ensure that everyone in the business can get access to realistic data, without increasing your security risk.
The report proves the effectiveness of masking. 95% of organizations now use static data masking, with 81% rating it highly effective in preventing data breaches. For Salesforce sandboxes, static masking ensures that customer PII, financial data, and other sensitive information cannot be exposed, even if a sandbox is breached or accessed by unauthorized users.
Explore More: Get the complete guide to data masking methods and techniques >>
How Organizations Data Mask for Salesforce
Out of 280 enterprise leaders, 24% protect sensitive data on Salesforce. Learn why and what other platforms organizations mask on, detailed in our 2025 State of Data Masking Solutions Report.
The Salesforce Data Protection Challenge in 2025
The 2025 report reveals the consequences of inadequate data security: 60% of organizations have experienced breaches in non-production environments. Salesforce data compliance has become more complex as organizations expand their use of customer data. The report also reveals several trends directly impacting Salesforce security.
Salesforce Is a Top Masking Priority
According to our report, 24% of organizations identify Salesforce as a data source they need to mask. This makes it the 4th most-protected business application after Oracle (42%), SQL Server (31%), and SAP (29%). This reflects Salesforce's central role in customer relationship management across industries.
Expanding Use Cases Drive More Exposure
Organizations work with Salesforce data across multiple high-risk environments:
- 100% use sensitive data in analytics workflows. This includes Salesforce customer data in BI reports and dashboards.
- 95% use it in software testing, validating integrations and custom applications.
- 90% use it in AI development. This includes training models for lead scoring, churn prediction, and personalization.
Each copy of your Salesforce sandbox potentially contains real customer PII. Organizations typically maintain 7-10 copies of each production dataset across these environments, further expanding the attack surface.
The False Trade-Offs Holding Organizations Back
- Despite the risks, many organizations hesitate to implement comprehensive Salesforce masking because they fear it will:
- Slow down development (believed by 61% of organizations).
- Degrade data quality (feared by 54%).
- Create bottlenecks for testing teams (cited as a concern by 54%).
However, organizations using modern automated masking solutions prove these concerns unfounded. With the right approach, you can protect Salesforce customer data without losing development velocity.
Three Critical Questions to Ask When Evaluating Salesforce Data Masking Solutions
Here are three critical questions to ask when selecting an enterprise-scale solution for masking Salesforce sandboxes:
1. Will the solution work across your enterprise to facilitate integration testing?
Many applications rely on Salesforce data along with other data sources. The solution you choose needs to work for all of these data sources, otherwise, your integration testing scenarios will be incomplete. It’s also essential that referential integrity is retained between these sources.
Referential integrity means that a specific record is masked the same wherever it occurs. For example, whether a record for Robert occurs in Salesforce or Oracle, Robert must always be masked to Steven, and Robert’s SSN must be masked the same in all data sets. In addition to preserving the primary and foreign keys that are needed to use and integrate the data sets effectively, it ensures that in an integration testing scenario you are actually testing how all the pieces fit together.
The importance of this cannot be overstated. Our report found that 76% of organizations using static data masking apply it specifically to integration testing. This high adoption rate reflects the reality that most business applications don't operate in isolation. Your Salesforce org connects to ERP systems, payment processors, marketing automation platforms, and data warehouses. Each integration point represents a potential compliance failure if referential integrity isn't maintained.
For example, if a customer record in Salesforce is masked one way, but the same customer's financial data in your SQL Server billing system is masked differently (or not at all), your integration tests will fail to catch real-world issues. Worse, the unmasked data in the billing system creates a compliance vulnerability that could lead to regulatory penalties.
When choosing a solution, think about the applications that you test and deploy that rely on multiple data sources. Do you have a way to ensure that records are masked the same way between those data sources? Otherwise, your testing scenarios will be more time-consuming and riskier, since you can’t see how the whole system works before pushing to live.
If the solution you are looking at can only mask Salesforce, you will not be able to ensure that your masked Salesforce data can work with SQL Server, Postgres, or any other data source or application that interacts with it. Watch out for this, as it’s common for point-solution vendors to add a masking component that will work only in the Salesforce realm. If masking isn’t the vendor’s core competency, you may also be exposing yourself to more risk, which gets us to our next critical question.
2. Does the solution offer strong, irreversible masking?
There are two key points to consider here. One, the solution must replace production data with realistic data values, and two, it must mask in a manner that can’t be reverse-engineered.
To the first point, make sure the solution you choose doesn’t simply scramble the data, but rather provides fictitious yet realistic, business-specific data. The resulting masked values should provide no value to hackers, but should be functional for any non-production use case. This is an essential time-saver across QA and UA. Imagine pushing an application to live without being able to see that the first and last name fields are indeed names, or what order they appear in!
The shift to irreversible masking reflects industry recognition of its effectiveness. Our report found that 95% of organizations now use static data masking. Why? Because 81% rate it highly effective at preventing data breaches, and 79% rate it highly effective for scalability.
Unlike reversible methods (like tokenization or dynamic masking), static masking ensures that once your Salesforce sandbox is masked, the data provides zero value to attackers.
Secondly, ask about the masking algorithms themselves - can they be reverse-engineered? Ensure they can give you sufficient detail on this point on how their algorithms operate. There is no point in masking the data if once it’s obfuscated, a hacker could simply back out the original value or break through the algorithm. A masking algorithm should be designed as irreversible, purposely destroying information so the original data is not retrievable from the masked dataset.
3. Does the solution offer automated sensitive data discovery?
Masking is not a one-time process. Your Salesforce data will be constantly changing and your testers will need fresh compliant test data to ensure that the test environment they are working with reflects reality. Therefore, data discovery and masking both need to be fast and automatic - you don’t want to be manually sifting through all of your data to find what fields are sensitive. Choosing a solution with automated data discovery capabilities helps you quickly ensure compliance (allowing you to complete the first data mask faster), and makes it easier to keep your masked data up to date.
Companies can have 1-2 years out-of-date test data because it’s so tedious to go through and find sensitive data when there is a large schema change. This common tradeoff between speed and compliance can lead to very time-consuming production incidents down the line!
Salesforce data is constantly changing every time a new field is added (ex: each time the business decides to collect a new customer detail). Similarly, it changes every time a new AppExchange solution is installed - these bring their own objects and fields, which often contain PII.
You need an automated approach to scan for sensitive data and make frequent refreshes. You don’t want to have to do an arduous manual review process, or need to purchase a separate tool to help with sensitive data discovery at scale.
The 2025 report confirms the importance of automated discovery. While 90% of organizations are confident in identifying sensitive data, the reality is that manual approaches struggle to keep pace with Salesforce's dynamic nature.
Automated discovery becomes even more critical when you consider where Salesforce data flows:
- 100% of organizations use Salesforce data in analytics, requiring discovery across data warehouse platforms like Snowflake or Databricks.
- 95% use it in testing environments where schemas change frequently.
- 90% potentially use it in AI models where even seemingly innocuous fields can become identifiers.
Organizations trying to manually track Salesforce PII across all these environments face an impossible task. Automated discovery isn't just convenient. It's the only scalable approach to comprehensive protection.
The Best Solution for Salesforce Data Masking
More and more companies realize that to keep up with regulations, they need to have a robust way to find all their sensitive data so that nothing leaks through into test environments. The global sensitive data discovery market is projected to grow from $5.1B in 2020 to $12.4B by 2026, with a CAGR of 16.1%, and the highest CAGR is expected in Cloud (vs on-prem). But, such tools are costly and stop at discovering sensitive data. What you need is a solution for masking PII data that can also handle sensitive data discovery, and which as a part of that discovery process, assigns the right masking algorithm to keep your data safe.
The market confirms what the data shows: organizations recognize they need robust solutions for protecting Salesforce and other business application data. Our report found that 24% of organizations identify Salesforce as a source they need to mask, but the challenge extends beyond Salesforce alone. Organizations need solutions that protect Salesforce alongside data sources like Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and SAP.
Perforce Delphix offers comprehensive data masking solutions that eliminate compliance risks while ensuring data usability for testing, development, and analytics. Our platform automatically identifies sensitive data — such as PII and financial details — and transforms it into secure, fictitious values with full referential integrity across your data environments.
Ensure Compliance and Enhance Data Security
With Delphix, you can define centralized masking policies and apply them across your enterprise, achieving compliance with privacy regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS. Our masking solutions neutralize security risks in non-production environments, eliminating the threat of data breaches during development and testing activities.
Accelerate Development with Integrated Masking and Data Delivery
The Delphix DevOps Data Platform seamlessly combines automated masking with on-demand data delivery, providing secure, realistic test data for your environments, including Salesforce. Empower your teams to innovate quickly with compliant, virtualized data that’s available within minutes.
Experience the Power of Salesforce Data Masking
Discover how Delphix simplifies compliance and accelerates innovation. Request a no-pressure demo today to see why industry leaders trust Delphix to protect their sensitive data.