On today’s episode of the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re bringing on Ian Glazer, SVP Identity Product Management, and Laura Pelkey, Sr. Manager, Security Customer Engagement at Salesforce. We talk all things MFA, 

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Ian Glazer and Laura Pelkey.

Ian Knows Security

Ian is a new voice on the pod, though he’s been with Salesforce for 8 years. At Salesforce, he works on everything related to Identity Services, which encompasses everything from single sign-on to the next generation of identity services to multi-factor authentication (MFA). Before Salesforce, he spent many years in the identity industry and is the co-founder and a board member of IDPro, the professional organization for digital identity management.

Laura, a pod regular you may recognize from Salesforce Live, has been on the security team for five years and in the security industry for ten. She also was a Salesforce admin at the beginning of her career, “so I definitely empathize with all of our admins listening and the challenges that they face securing their Salesforce instance.”

MFA has been a hotly-discussed topic in the admin community recently, so this is the perfect pair of people to talk to about all the reasons to make the switch sooner than later. “It’s one of the most effective things you can do to increase protection against different kinds of threats, like phishing attacks—common things people face everyday that affect businesses everywhere,” Laura says.

The benefit outweighs the risk

“A lot of this stems from a basically and commonly-shared awareness that passwords are horrible,” Ian says, “because we’re busy people, there tends to be reuse of passwords and that’s known by the attackers.” This fact makes it relatively easy for someone trying to get access to your org to find the credentials they need from a breach somewhere else. It’s like they’ve found a key and now they’re trying it on every lock they can find. “The beauty of multi-factor authentication is it adds something else to the mix protecting you that really only you should have,” he adds.

While enabling MFA adds a little bit of friction to your login process, the returns you get in terms of massively improving your org’s security are well worth it. As the headlines fill up with news of high-profile data breaches and ransomware attacks, anything you can do to protect yourself will help you sleep a little more soundly. “You can think of MFA as a seatbelt for the internet—it’s just that effective,” Ian says.

MFA has never been more important, especially in our current hybrid work environment. “Security is a huge part of trust,” Laura says, “your brand reputation depends on trust, and there could be huge monetary implications if something like a breach occurs.” As Ian says, “you’re doing this for your customers’ sake, and that is 100% worth the effort.”

Podcast Swag:

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Links:

• Multi-Factor Authentication for Salesforce
• Security Q&A with Laura and Kerry

Social:

• Ian: @IGlazer
• Laura: @LauraPelkey1
• Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns 
• Gillian: @GillianKBruce
• Mike: @MikeGerholdt

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