SANS Institute Strengthens Salesforce Security with AppOmni

The Challenge

Salesforce sits at the core of SANS Institute, supporting critical operations across finance, customer service, and beyond. But after 15 years of rapid growth, the environment became increasingly complex—sprawling configurations, inconsistent controls, and limited visibility made it difficult to understand true security risk or enforce best practices at scale.

As the Salesforce footprint expanded, the SANS security team found itself managing a system that had grown faster than its guardrails, while native tools painted an overly optimistic picture of security posture.

Key challenges included:

• A highly complex, long-lived Salesforce environment with inconsistent configurations across teams
• Limited visibility into misconfigurations, access risks, and security gaps
• Over-reliance on Salesforce’s native health check, which reported a misleading 90% security score
• A false sense of confidence that masked real exposure and delayed remediation
• Growing pressure to refactor the environment and apply stronger security best practices without disrupting the business

“We were lacking clarity. AppOmni enabled us to recognize gaps in our SaaS security and effectively harden the system to our standards.”

— Jason Sledge, Senior Salesforce.com Administrator, SANS Institute

The Requirements 

As security challenges grew, SANS recognized the need for a SaaS security solution that went beyond basic checks. The team needed real-time visibility, threat detection, and a practical path to remediation.

The ideal platform wouldn’t just identify risks; it would also enable the team to manage and resolve them effectively. Key requirements included:

The Results

With AppOmni, SANS Institute:

• Doubled remediation capacity, enabling faster action without added resources
  
• Surfaced the most critical SaaS risks, replacing fragmented and incomplete data
  
• Detected configuration drift to reinforce secure baselines
  
• Improved collaboration across security, Salesforce, and non-technical teams
  
• Simplified audits and strengthened governance with accessible security data
  

Why It Matters

False confidence is dangerous when managing a critical SaaS platform like Salesforce. By replacing surface-level checks with continuous visibility and prioritized insights, SANS Institute turned complexity into control. Security teams could finally focus on fixing what mattered most.