Discover Private Connect with AWS
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe the Salesforce Private Connect feature.
- Understand the functionality of the Salesforce Private Connect feature.
“Nothing is more important to our company than the privacy of our customers’ data.”
—Parker Harris, Co-Founder, Salesforce
Securely Integrate Your Web and App Layers
A lot of our customers use Amazon Web Services (AWS) as their cloud layer and Salesforce as their app layer. Private Connect seamlessly bridges these two layers for a unified, secure experience.
Private Connect directly connects Salesforce first-party data centers and AWS regions. It also enables you to make your cross-cloud communications secure and private. After you create a connection between your Salesforce org and your data hosted within AWS, you can easily route HTTP/s traffic through, shielding it from public internet threats.
A Dedicated Secure, Connection
As a Salesforce admin, you work hard to integrate various cloud-based applications with the Salesforce platform to achieve a single source of truth for your company. But integrations, while necessary, pose inherent risks: The more your data travels across clouds, the more it’s exposed to the threats and vulnerabilities of the public internet.
Think of your data as cargo ships and your integrations as ports that temporarily dock your ships while they travel. When cargo ships leave their main dock—your Salesforce org—to travel to a port—an integrated app in a different cloud— they’re untethered for a few months in the sea, vulnerable to threats like bad weather and pirates. Similarly, your data traffic flows untethered across the public internet whenever it travels from cloud to cloud, making it vulnerable to a variety of public internet threats. Of course, you work hard to protect your ships, fitting them with top-notch lifeboats and high-quality alloy, but those measures often take a lot of work. In our analogy, that translates to a lot of code.
But what if there was another solution that requires less work on your behalf? What if the passage from port-to-port was privately owned and guarded, rendering it free from bad weather and pirates altogether—something like the Panama Canal for data?
Streamlined Setup and Maintenance
Private Connect is a simple security measure that creates a secure, privately managed network connection between your external endpoint services and your Salesforce org. It reduces exposure to internet threats by privately routing all traffic flowing between Salesforce and your external endpoint service over a dedicated network connection instead of the public internet.
How does it work? Specify the network connection details in the Private Connect Setup node, and after the connection is provisioned on both sides, identified traffic is automatically redirected through the connection.
As an admin, you have complete control over the connectivity options that are available. If you want to tear down the connection, it only takes a single click.
It Goes Both Ways
Private Connect allows bidirectional access to APIs. That means you can make data callouts from Salesforce to your external endpoint services and callouts from your external endpoints to the core Salesforce APIs, including SOAP, REST, and Bulk. When callouts go out from Salesforce to the external endpoint service, we call the connections outbound. When callouts come into Salesforce from the external endpoint, we call the connections inbound.
If your administrative expertise lies in external endpoints, you can set up an Inbound Private Connection from the external endpoint to securely receive data from Salesforce. If you’re a Salesforce admin, no problem—you can set up an Outbound Private Connection from Salesforce to an external endpoint service to bring data into Salesforce securely. Lastly, through our joint partnership with AWS, Private Connect is available through Amazon AppFlow, a fully managed integration service that enables you to securely transfer data between Salesforce and AWS services, like Amazon S3 or Amazon RedShift.
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