Salesforce is now offering Data Cloud to its customers for free! 

Recently announced at Dreamforce 2023, all existing Salesforce customers with Sales Cloud or Service Cloud (Enterprise or Unlimited licenses) now have access to Salesforce Data Cloud. This complimentary package includes two Tableau Creator licenses at no additional cost and Data Cloud licenses for up to 10,000 profiles. 

Salesforce Data Cloud is a rapidly evolving product within the Salesforce ecosystem, built natively on Salesforce Lightning, and seamlessly integrates with existing orgs. Salesforce is democratizing access to their customer data platform, ensuring that businesses of all sizes can harness the power of a data platform to connect, unify, and harmonize data, and thus creating a single source of truth for customers (Customer 360). This encompasses external data from company websites, mobile apps, and various business applications/products, as well as internal data from Salesforce orgs. In turn, this will facilitate improvements in sales, marketing, and operations through enhanced personalization, advanced segmentation, improved customer experiences, and more accurate predictions and recommendations. Salesforce Data Cloud offers advanced capabilities to make customer data management seamless. 

The complimentary Tableau licenses offer access to a best-in-class business intelligence tool that is leading the adoption of AI and specifically Generative AI with the recently announced AI assistant called Einstein Copilot for Tableau. Tableau integration with Salesforce offers unparalleled opportunities to accelerate data discovery and new insights. 

It’s worth noting that Salesforce Data Cloud doesn’t store data within native Salesforce Objects; instead, it resides in an off-core data lake as an integral part of the packaged solution. 

Source: Salesforce 

Key Salesforce Data Cloud Integrations

Here are some noteworthy native Salesforce Data Cloud connectors: 

• • Salesforce CRM 
  • Marketing Cloud 
  • Marketing Cloud Personalization (formerly Interaction Studio) 
  • B2C Commerce 

Companies can also benefit from the pre-built Customer 360 Data Model, which serves as the standard data model for Data Cloud. The Customer 360 Data Model is designed to enhance interoperability and streamline the integration of data across various cloud applications. It can be extended to establish data lakes, support data analytics, facilitate machine learning, and more. 

Salesforce Data Cloud serves as a pivotal entry point for capitalizing on AI investments. Specifically, AI is seamlessly integrated into Data Cloud to facilitate the harmonization of data from diverse sources and formats, automatically detect and rectify data discrepancies and anomalies, enhance customer data through enrichment, and elevate insights by predicting customer churn, forecasting, and making customer recommendations. Additionally, customers have the capability to leverage Salesforce Einstein Discovery for creating their own bespoke AI models. We consider this approach a pragmatic means of aligning business objectives and goals with the power of AI. 

In addition to the Customer 360 features and AI capabilities, a standout feature is the pre-built connectors to both Google BigQuery and Snowflake. These connectors enable effortless access to data with zero duplication. Essentially, this means that you can access your BigQuery/Snowflake data without the need for replication or an ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) process. 

Explore Salesforce Data Cloud with Kenway

If you are considering how Salesforce Data Cloud aligns with your Salesforce roadmap, Kenway Consulting is delighted to offer you a complimentary one-hour workshop. These workshops can assist you in understanding the value proposition and making informed decisions regarding your Salesforce product roadmap. To schedule your workshop, please contact us at info@kenwayconsulting.com. 

FAQs:

1. Is Salesforce Data Cloud Secure?

Yes, Salesforce Data Cloud is indeed secure. Salesforce boasts a robust track record of prioritizing data security in Salesforce, with substantial investments made to safeguard their customers’ data. Salesforce Data Cloud incorporates a range of security measures to ensure the protection of customer data. These measures include: 

• Encryption: Salesforce employs encryption for customer data both at rest and in transit. This means that even if unauthorized access is gained to customer data, it remains unintelligible without the encryption key. 
• Access Control: Salesforce utilizes role-based access control to guarantee that only authorized users have access to customer data. Customers also have the flexibility to configure Salesforce to implement additional security measures, such as multi-factor authentication. 
• Security Monitoring: Salesforce maintains round-the-clock security monitoring of its systems to detect potential threats. Should any security threat be identified, Salesforce takes immediate action to safeguard customer data. 

2. When Was Salesforce Data Cloud Released?

Salesforce Data Cloud was released in 2023, as a rebrand of Salesforce Customer Data Platform (CDP) and Genie. It was first announced at Dreamforce 2022 and became generally available in early 2023. 

3. What are some tips for using Salesforce Data Cloud effectively?

• Start with a clear plan: Before you start using Salesforce Data Cloud, it is important to have a clear plan for what you want to achieve. This will help you to choose the right features and tools, and to get the most out of your investment. 
• Get your team on board: Salesforce Data Cloud is a powerful tool, but it is important to get your team on board before you start using it. This means training your team on how to use Salesforce Data Cloud and explaining the benefits of using it. 
• Monitor your results: It is important to monitor your results after you start using Salesforce Data Cloud. This will help you to identify what is working and what is not, and to make necessary adjustments. 

4. Can Salesforce Data Cloud help with data privacy compliance? 

Yes, Salesforce Data Cloud can help with data privacy compliance in a number of ways. 

• Data unification: Salesforce Data Cloud can help you to unify your customer data from across multiple sources and create a single view of each customer. This can help you to better understand your customers and their privacy preferences and enable quick response to privacy inquiries. 
• Data quality: Salesforce Data Cloud provides tools to help you identify and correct data errors, and to ensure that your data is complete and accurate. This is important for ensuring that you are complying with data privacy regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA). 
• Data access control: Salesforce Data Cloud provides role-based access control to ensure that only authorized users have access to your customer data. This can help you to prevent unauthorized access to your customer data and to comply with data privacy regulations. 
• Data encryption: Salesforce Data Cloud encrypts your customer data at rest and in transit. This helps to protect your data from unauthorized access, even if it is intercepted. 
• Data audit logging: Salesforce Data Cloud provides audit logging to track all access to your customer data. This can help you to identify any suspicious activity and to comply with data privacy regulations.

In addition to these features, Salesforce Data Cloud also includes a number of tools and resources to help you with data privacy and compliance. For example, Salesforce provides a Data Privacy Center that provides guidance on how to comply with various data privacy regulations. Salesforce also provides a number of pre-built data privacy reports that can help you to assess your compliance with these regulations.

Overall, Salesforce Data Cloud is a powerful tool that can help you to improve your data privacy and compliance posture.