Introducing Data Cloud governance

Data Cloud Governance: Protecting Your Data in the Agentic Landscape

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What is Data Cloud Governance?

As a Salesforce Admin, you’re the backbone of your organization’s data management. You make sure everyone has the right data at the right time to do their jobs efficiently, while keeping everything secure, compliant, and running smoothly. But as we move into an agent-driven future, the workplace is evolving. Employees won’t just manage other employees—they’ll also oversee digital agents. That means your role as an admin is expanding, too. Just like you carefully manage data security for your users, you’ll need to extend that same level of control to digital agents, ensuring they apply the same data security practices while keeping governance tight.

When an agent responds to a request, it pulls in both structured and unstructured data—from your internal CRM systems to external data sources. But not all data is the same! Different types have different semantics and are stored, processed, and curated in different ways to make sure they’re used effectively. The challenge? Keeping everything consistent and well-governed at scale across all the places this data is used—whether it’s for Agents, Analytics, Segmentation, or beyond. Managing this complexity is key to ensuring your artificial intelligence (AI)-powered experiences stay reliable, secure, and efficient.

We built Data Cloud Governance from the ground up to make managing your data seamless and stress-free. It’s designed to handle both structured and unstructured data while being deeply integrated into the Salesforce Platform, ensuring consistency in responses across all surface areas where your data is used.

Salesforce is already a trusted, secure platform, and Data Cloud Governance takes that trust even further. With built-in features like AI Tagging and Classification to keep data organized, plus Policy Based Governance to manage access and scale consistent policies across all surface areas in Data Cloud, you can stay in complete control, with the transparency and trust you need to thrive.

What does it mean to use Data Cloud Governance in Salesforce?

In Salesforce, Data Cloud Governance makes it easy for admins to manage and enforce governance across their organization, all with clicks, not code! Here is the framework we recommend to get started.

How Data Cloud Governance works on the Salesforce Platform.

Private Connect for Data Cloud: Private Connect for Data Cloud allows you to securely manage sensitive data by establishing private, direct connections between Data Cloud and data sources such as Snowflake or Amazon Redshift. This means your data is completely isolated and never travels over the public internet. For admins, it’s an easy way to securely manage data access while ensuring trusted, private connections between systems.

Customer Managed Keys: With Customer Managed Keys, a feature of Platform Encryption for Data Cloud, admins have more control over data security by managing their own encryption keys for data at rest. This ensures that all data at rest in Data Cloud stays protected, helping organizations meet compliance requirements and keep sensitive information secure with confidence.

Data Spaces: Data Spaces allow you to segregate data, metadata, and processes by brand, BU, and region such that each business unit can maintain control over its own data while still only using one instance of Data Cloud.

AI Tagging and Classification: Let AI do the heavy lifting when it comes to organizing your data! With AI-recommended tags, admins can automatically label and classify records—for example, marking data as “HIPAA”, “GDPR”, or “PII”—to ensure data is managed and protected consistently. These tags follow a business or compliance framework that fits your organization’s needs. You can use the built-in taxonomy or create your own to match your policies. Plus, these tags help apply governance rules consistently across all the places your data is used—making security and compliance easier than ever!

Policy Based Governance: With Policy Based Governance, admins can control who sees what data, whether it’s a user or an AI agent. You can author, manage, and enforce custom access policies to ensure everyone only gets access to the data they’re allowed to see. These policies can be set at different levels—field, object, or record—giving you fine-grained control over data access. Plus, they automatically apply across all areas of Data Cloud, including Agentforce, Analytics, Segmentation, and more, so your data stays secure and consistent everywhere.

Dynamic Data Masking: Dynamic Masking, a masking policy you can create, helps keep sensitive information secure by automatically hiding or showing data based on who’s accessing it. For example, a service agent might need to verify a Social Security Number but won’t see the full value—keeping the data protected while still allowing them to do their job. Meanwhile, an HR agent could see the full number if the policy allows it. Admins can easily set up these policies as part of Policy Based governance, ensuring sensitive data stays safe while workflows run smoothly.

What does this mean for admins?

Data Cloud Governance makes it easy for admins to manage, secure, and scale data access in Data Cloud without the hassle of complex custom setups. You can automatically organize both structured and unstructured data, including external data with zero copy. Admins can now set policies once and apply them everywhere in Data Cloud, ensuring data integrity, security, and compliance at scale. With built-in governance tools, you can protect data, reduce manual work, and minimize risk—all while keeping Data Cloud trusted and well-governed.

We realize that you may be using existing governance tools in your reference architecture. With our growing governance and zero copy partnerships, our goal is to allow you to extend those investments consistently to all surface areas in Data Cloud.

Key Governance Policies

  • Access Policies: Define flexible attribute-based access control (ABAC) policies to ensure that a user (humans or agents) only views data that they are entitled to.
  • Data Masking Policies: Define and enforce Dynamic Data Masking rules to obfuscate sensitive data in any surface area including Agentforce, Analytics, Segmentation, etc.
  • Data Purpose Policies: Establish rules for when and how data is shared for Activation, Segmentation, and Sharing.

With Data Cloud Governance, admins gain the control and automation they need to enforce compliance, streamline operations, and future-proof their data strategy.

Get started with Data Cloud Governance

Ready to dive into Data Cloud Governance? Check out our new product video to get started.

What you should do next

Get hands-on with Data Cloud Governance! Explore how it can revolutionize your workflows with powerful, built-in governance tools. Private Connect for Data Cloud and Platform Encryption for Data Cloud are already generally available (GA), and you can now get started with the limited beta of AI Tagging and Classification, as well as Policy Based Governance, by asking your Account Executive for more details. Want to connect with Salesforce experts and see how others are leveraging Data Cloud? Join the Datablazer Community Group and meet us at a World Tour event near you!

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