The incidents that made Salesforce
security a board-level question

£1.9B

estimated economic damage from the JLR breach alone

4.4M

Customers notified of a Salesforce-related data exposure by TransUnion

6.5M

Co-op’s member personal data compromised

700+

organizations targeted in the 2025 Salesforce breach wave

73.5%

of Salesforce admins unfamiliar with the Shared Responsibility Model

Why this matters?

The assumption that Salesforce handles security no longer fails quietly.

In 2016, most enterprises treated Salesforce security as the vendor's problem. The conversation rarely reached the CIO. That model worked because the consequences of getting it wrong were contained - a sales team disruption, some pipeline data loss.

In 2026, when Salesforce governance breaks, the impact is not contained to a dataset. It halts production, exposes regulated data, triggers regulatory action, and in recent cases has driven billions in economic damage and executive turnover.

For enterprises operating under GDPR, NIS2, DORA, FINRA, or FedRAMP, the question is no longer whether Salesforce governance matters - but whether your organization has designed the governance model it requires.

The choice impacts more than security. It defines your compliance posture, your ability to recover from failure, and whether the next attack is survivable.

What you’ll learn in this white paper

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The 2016 vs 2026
contrast
How Salesforce transformed from a departmental CRM into Tier 1 enterprise infrastructure — and what that shift demands from security teams today
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The anatomy of the 2025 breach wave
What happened across JLR, M&S, Co-op, Allianz, and TransUnion — and why organized threat groups are targeting the customer side of the Shared Responsibility Model
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The Shared Responsibility Model gap
73.5% of Salesforce admins were unfamiliar with it. Nearly 30% had no backup solution. That gap is the attack surface — and a decade of assumption built it
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The TRUST Framework: five pillars of 2026-grade governance
Transparency, Resilience, Unified governance, Safeguards, and Technology — what distinguishes enterprises that recovered quickly from those still recovering
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Why Agentforce raises the stakes further
Autonomous agents execute at machine speed. Three governance gaps already visible in early Agentforce deployments — and why the window is narrower than before
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What CIOs and Enterprise Architects must own today
The architectural and operational decisions that determine whether the next attack is survivable — and the unified governance model that closes the gaps fragmented toolchains create

Who this is for?

CIOs and CDOs at regulated enterprises responsible for platform security and business continuity

Enterprise Architects and Platform Owners managing complex multi-org Salesforce estates

DevSecOps and Security Leaders building governance discipline into Salesforce operations

Salesforce Architects and Release Managers accountable for change velocity and deployment risk

Why now

Salesforce is no longer just a CRM platform.

For many enterprises, it has become operational infrastructure for revenue systems, customer data, service operations, partner ecosystems, and increasingly, AI-driven business processes.

That changes the security equation entirely.

The organizations that adapt will build governance directly into how Salesforce changes are developed, deployed, secured, and recovered.

The organizations that do not will continue layering manual controls onto systems moving too fast for human oversight.

Salesforce Security: 2016 vs. 2026 provides a practical framework for understanding how the security landscape changed, where operational risk is growing, and what enterprise teams need to modernize next.