Salesforce Data Cloud Governance is Generally Available

Salesforce Data Cloud Governance is Generally Available

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High-Scale Governance for all your data and metadata

We're excited to announce the general availability of Data Cloud Governance - a major leap forward in how enterprises manage and secure data in the AI era.

Data Cloud unlocks the full value of your data across the enterprise to power your Customer 360 apps, Agentforce, and amplify your existing data lake or warehouse investments to activate real-time insights and intelligent actions across all applications. However, achieving truly unified data governance at scale is inherently complex. Data sources are often siloed across disparate platforms, and governing both structured and unstructured data together presents unique challenges. This leads to fragmented controls and makes it incredibly difficult to maintain consistent policy enforcement across every business operation. This inherent complexity can make it tough to scale AI with confidence. Data Cloud Governance changes that. It delivers native, policy enforcement consistency across every facet of Data Cloud, enabling the seamless convergence of governance across all your data platforms and data types. This secures data by seamlessly enforcing access controls at the point of usage, driving compliance, and building the confidence to truly scale AI across your organization.

Why governing your data matters in the AI era

In the age of AI, trust in data isn't optional - it's the foundation for innovation, compliance, and customer confidence. Salesforce Data Cloud Governance delivers native, consistent policy enforcement across all your data and metadata at enterprise scale.

In today's data landscape, the sheer volume and complexity of structured and unstructured data from Salesforce and Zero Copy sources is exponentially increasing and posing a significant challenge. CIOs want AI adoption to scale and move quickly. However, even with existing, often rigid, governance frameworks already in place, organizations are increasingly challenged by a lack of confidence that data access is consistently enforced. This difficulty in ensuring the right user has access to the data they are entitled to, in the right context, makes accurate and timely data access a significant liability, hindering both innovation and trust. This leads to:

• Fragmented data access: As data flows across numerous teams and systems, maintaining precise control over who has access, and ensuring that access is appropriate within the context of their application experience, becomes an increasingly complex and labor-intensive task.
• Unreliable AI experiences: Without strong controls over data access and context, AI models risk unintentionally exposing sensitive information, perpetuating biases, or making poor decisions, leading to unreliable predictions and broken personalized experiences.
• Escalated compliance risks: A lack of visibility to access controls makes it difficult to prove adherence to data privacy laws across diverse and disconnected data sources, increasing the risk of penalties.
• Erosion of trust: When data access isn't clear or consistently controlled, confidence in data security, privacy, and AI-driven initiatives diminishes.
• Limited Data Visibility: Organizations struggle to maintain a clear, comprehensive view of where sensitive data resides, how it's being accessed, and by whom, hindering effective oversight and control.

These challenges are widespread, underscoring why, according to the Salesforce's "State of IT" report, 48% of IT leaders believe their data isn't ready for AI, and 55% lack confidence in applying proper guardrails. Even with existing frameworks in place, scaling AI with confidence remains a challenge.

At Salesforce, trust has been our #1 value for over 25 years. We've built our deeply unified platform with security and governance embedded from the ground up, evolving alongside the technological landscape - from cloud and mobile to predictive AI and now, generative AI and Agentforce. Enabling organizations to leverage powerful new technologies safely and responsibly is fundamental to our mission.

Deploying trusted AI agents requires more than just powerful models. It requires a holistic approach rooted in a secure and well-governed data foundation, secure development practices, and continuous oversight throughout the AI lifecycle. Our deeply unified platform provides the comprehensive capabilities needed to meet this challenge head-on.

The promise of Data Cloud Governance

Within the Salesforce Platform, Data Cloud Governance provides native, policy-driven trust controls directly to your unified data foundation, enabling secure data activation across every use case - using tools ranging from AI agents like Agentforce to analytics, personalization, and segmentation.

Built directly into Data Cloud, governance scales seamlessly, with native controls for both data and metadata to manage access. The result is seamless, high-scale governance with policies consistently applied everywhere, thereby creating trust by design.

With Data Cloud Governance, businesses can:

Easily govern structured and unstructured data

As businesses increasingly rely on AI and automation, managing both structured and unstructured data efficiently and securely is more critical than ever. But here's the challenge: data isn't static, and it's no longer just structured datasets that organizations are working with. Data is constantly flowing into Data Cloud, moving across Agentforce, analytics, and segmentation workflows. Data Cloud Governance simplifies data management by allowing you to automatically tag and classify structured and unstructured data with metadata tags.

Enforce consistent data access across all data sources

With Data Cloud Governance you can easily classify metadata and create policies on top of metadata tags. This metadata exchange is what powers seamless governance interoperability across ingested data, zero-copy data, and third-party integrations, ensuring data remains connected, consistent, and compliant. With our new policy-based framework, governance is simplified at scale meaning you can author a policy once, and it's enforced automatically across all Data Cloud data.

Establish a secure and private connection

When it comes to data security, there's no room for compromise. Data Cloud Governance ensures that all data remains encrypted, and with our flexible key management options even in the event of a security breach, sensitive information remains protected and inaccessible. We also have a secure solution to safeguard Data Cloud data by enabling private connectivity between Salesforce and external services without exposing them to the public internet.

Use Cases Across Industries

• ​​Localized Marketing, Global Compliance: Enforce attribute-based access control (ABAC) so marketers only see customer data for their specific country or region, enabling targeted campaigns while meeting local privacy laws.
• Healthcare: Automatically classify patient records as HIPAA-sensitive. Dynamic masking policies ensure only authorized care teams see relevant data, protecting privacy even during automated interactions.
• Retail: Tag product, inventory, and preference data as PII or region-specific. Apply policies across analytics and personalization engines, ensuring compliance and relevance at scale.
• Finance: Encrypt financial data at rest with customer- or externally-managed keys. Securely connect to external systems and data warehouses via private connectivity, ensuring regulatory compliance and secure data exchange.
• Service: Automatically tag and route customer interaction data. AI agents in Agentforce access precisely the right knowledge-base content, securely surfaced based on customer context.

"Enterprises face a monumental challenge in governing their increasingly complex data landscapes; traditional methods simply can't keep pace. We expect that Data Cloud Governance will help us deliver a safer, smarter and more compliant leap forward in how enterprises manage and secure data in the AI era," said Stephen Nicolls, Global IT Managing Director, Accenture. "In the future, the vision is for organizations to be able to manage access and enforce consistent policies at any stage of the data journey, building a resilient foundation and positioning them incredibly well for a more regulated and data-intensive future."

Under the Hood: Precision Governance

Here is how Salesforce enables customers to govern, secure, and ensure compliance across all unified data within Data Cloud.

The key features available now that enable data governance at scale include:

• AI tagging and classification: Automatically label and classify records with AI-recommended tags - marking data as 'HIPAA,' 'GDPR,' or 'PII.' These tags follow a business or compliance framework that fits any organization's needs.
• Policy-based governance: Helps easily author, manage, and enforce, fine-grained policies (field, object, record level) consistently across all your data. These policies automatically apply everywhere in Data Cloud, ensuring data access is consistently enforced across all features like Agentforce, analytics, and segmentation.
• Data spaces: Segregate data, metadata, and processes by brand, business unit (BU), and region such that each business unit can maintain control over its own data while still only using one instance of Data Cloud.
• Dynamic data masking: Intelligent, real-time protection for sensitive information. Data is dynamically masked or revealed based on policy, ensuring users see only what they're entitled to, without altering the underlying data.
• Private connect for Data Cloud: Securely connect external data sources - data lakes, warehouses, business apps - whether users are ingesting data or federating through zero-copy. This ensures consistent governance and privacy across all platforms, with direct, private connections that enhance data residency and protect against loss.

Platform encryption for Data Cloud: Enhanced control over your data's security. Data Cloud offers flexible key management, including customer or externally managed keys for direct control, and External Key Management for integrating with your AWS KMS accounts. Your data, fully protected.

How to get started

Data Cloud Governance is more than a powerful set of features - it's the strategic foundation for scaling AI with unwavering confidence. To begin, simply navigate to the Data Governance tab within Data Cloud.

Whether you're building groundbreaking AI experiences or ensuring data protection across complex systems, governance is the essential path to scalable, long-term success. With Data Cloud Governance, you can protect your data, accelerate growth, and transform into a truly autonomous and secure enterprise, all powered by the Salesforce Platform.

Resources

Explore how to get started with Data Cloud Governance.

• Data Cloud Governance Salesforce Admins Blog
• Data Cloud Governance Demo Video
• Data Cloud Governance Trailhead Module
• Data Cloud Governance Datasheet
• Data Cloud Governance Though Leadership Guide

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