A Closer Look at Salesforce Trusted Services: Building a Foundation for Secure, Resilient AI

In its April 2025 Trusted Services Briefing, Salesforce outlines the evolving landscape of data security, governance, and compliance, emphasizing trust’s critical role in enabling enterprise-scale innovation. As artificial intelligence and automation become more integrated into customer experiences and business operations, Salesforce positions Trusted Services as the foundation for reliable and ethical data usage.

This summary provides an overview of the platform’s key capabilities, upcoming product enhancements, and real-world use cases while also reflecting on potential areas for improvement.

Trust at the Core of AI Readiness

Salesforce has identified trusted data as a prerequisite for any AI or Agentforce strategy. AI models may draw on outdated, irrelevant, or non-compliant data without robust data governance, leading to unreliable outcomes or regulatory risk. The briefing illustrates the difference between ungoverned data chaos and structured, secure data supporting operational excellence and innovation.

Salesforce emphasizes a shared responsibility model. The company is responsible for providing secure, scalable, and innovative solutions, while customers are expected to implement controls tailored to their specific use cases. These include managing access permissions and data usage policies and ensuring organizational data integrity.

Key Capabilities of Trusted Services

Data Security

The Salesforce Shield suite delivers tools for monitoring, encrypting, and auditing data activity:

• Event Monitoring provides insights into who accessed what data, when, and where, with enhancements such as real-time connectors to Data Cloud.
• Platform Encryption protects data at rest, introducing flexibility in key management.
• Field Audit Trail tracks data changes at scale, with improved interfaces and extended retention options.
• Data Detect enables organizations to identify and classify sensitive information using out-of-the-box and custom detection patterns.

Security Center consolidates these tools into a unified operational view, providing centralized metrics, custom security policies, and compliance features suitable even for highly regulated sectors.

Data Compliance

Considering the complex global regulatory landscape—where over 70% of countries enforce unique privacy rules—Salesforce offers capabilities to automate and streamline compliance processes:

• Privacy Center supports consent management, data retention rules, and the execution of data subject rights, such as deletion.
• Data Mask & Seed enables development and testing in environments that mirror production while masking sensitive information to reduce risk.
• Sandboxes now support more rapid creation and enhanced storage, allowing teams to work securely with representative data.

Data Resilience

To address data continuity and recovery, Salesforce Trusted Services includes:

• Backup & Recover, which provides automated and on-demand backup, alerts for anomalies, and precise object-level restoration.
• Archive, a tool to help manage storage limits and improve performance through automated data retention.
• Salesforce Discover, which turns backup data into time-based insights, enabling trend analysis and accelerated AI development.

Salesforce Backup & Recover services are increasingly integrated and available for multi-platform use (incl. ServiceNow and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. , simplifying backup and archiving across SaaS environments. Archive and Discover are only available for Salesforce at present.

What’s Ahead: Product Roadmap Highlights

The Spring and Summer 2025 roadmap introduces a range of functional enhancements:

• Expanded objection support for Continuous Data Protection (Backup and Recover)
• Simplified automation re-enablement after seeding jobs complete (Data Mask and Seed)
• AI-powered sensitive data detection
• More Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) encryption options
• A new Data Subject App for managing privacy requests

These updates suggest a move toward more tightly integrated, intelligent, and user-friendly tools.

Real-World Impact: Customer Examples

Several customer stories illustrate the practical value of Trusted Services:

• Dale Carnegie reduced recovery time by 80% and streamlined compliance processes by moving from manual to automated backup.
• Oranje Furniture Care reduced manual effort and storage costs through automated archiving, freeing resources for other business priorities.
• Make-A-Wish achieved 90% faster data seeding and saved 40 development hours, helping them test with real production data more effectively.
• Molson Coors improved data security and operational efficiency by automating sandbox seeding and anonymization.

These examples illustrate how various organizations across industries leverage Salesforce’s tools to mitigate operational risk, enhance efficiency, and adhere to regulatory standards.

Potential Shortcomings and Considerations

While the Trusted Services framework is comprehensive, a few areas may warrant closer scrutiny or further development:

• Complexity of Implementation: Many features, notably Shield and Privacy Center, require technical setup and a strong understanding of organizational data flows. Smaller teams or less mature organizations may struggle to leverage these tools without additional support fully.
• Evolving AI Compliance Needs: As AI regulation rapidly evolves, the platform’s tools for managing AI-specific data governance (e.g., training data traceability, bias auditing) are not yet a central focus.
• Third-Party Integration: Although the roadmap emphasizes integration with Own broader ecosystem compatibility, and flexibility for mixed cloud environments could be improved further.

Conclusion

Salesforce Trusted Services provides robust capabilities to assist organizations in effectively managing the growing challenges associated with data security, compliance, and resilience, particularly in AI-driven transformation. Its shared responsibility model and comprehensive roadmap are well-suited to meet the needs of many enterprises, although successful implementation does require internal governance maturity and strategic alignment.

As organizations continue to navigate a world shaped by data privacy concerns, AI risks, and operational complexity, platforms like Salesforce Trusted Services may play a key role in building intelligent systems that are also trusted.