New data regulations pose challenges to how businesses store, process and manage data. From the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), to China’s most recent Personal Information Protection Act (PIPL), Dozens of regions around the world have passed laws or introduced pending legislation that restrict the flow of data. And while previous laws took many years to take effect, new regulations are moving much faster.

This means that organizations need to have an agile approach to compliance in order to be ready when new laws come into force, because complying with these regulations goes far beyond simply removing first and last names. Personal data can be found in many areas of applications: case comments, link to asset describing what you have, free text, emails containing names and basic information, and much more. This is why having a no-code platform is essential. Well-designed no-code platforms help solve these problems in an extremely efficient and agile way.

A no-code platform offers solutions that non-technical people, such as Salesforce admins, can implement rather than relying on expensive and often limited development resources. This means that high-quality solutions come online faster at a lower cost than if a developer implemented them.

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For example, suppose a Salesforce admin needs to add a new related custom object attached to a contact in their Salesforce environment, which will contain personally identifiable information (PII). The Salesforce admin can use the platform without code to ensure that the object complies with the organization’s policies for handling PII. Compliance is achieved faster and easier than if a developer had to modify the code.

Another example relates to data subject requests. While privacy platforms like OneTrust help organizations manage data privacy requirements and requests, such as GDPR’s right to be forgotten, a dedicated solution is often still needed to process requests in Salesforce. Processing these requests manually is not only time-consuming compared to an automated solution, but it is also error-prone.

No-code efficiency

Coding a solution to comply with data subject requests is time-consuming and expensive because Salesforce developers not only have to create and implement the code, but also maintain it. Each time a new field is added in Salesforce, the code must be modified to support that field. A no-code solution allows non-technical employees who are already familiar with the application, workflows, and underlying data to make these changes.

While a no-code platform ultimately benefits the entire organization by saving developer time, money, and resources, non-technical stakeholders such as Salesforce admins reap the lion’s share of the benefits. Indeed, no-code platforms make it easier and faster for them to ensure that the PII data in Salesforce for which they are responsible complies with their organization’s data privacy policies and practices.

It’s also inherently safer than coding apps from scratch. When programmers write code, it is possible to introduce infinite loops and other bugs that can damage the system they are working on. No-code platforms were designed so that while non-technical employees learn fine-grained abilities to create new features, these platforms were presumably tested to avoid introducing serious bugs or allowing user to damage or abuse the system.

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Security and integration

When looking for a no-code platform to manage privacy, it is essential to ensure that the platform is secure. After all, if the no-code platform isn’t secure, how can it build apps that will allow you to comply with privacy rules? So, like any system that is going to extract your data, the no-code platform needs multiple layers of encryption to ensure that the information is not visible to others, including the SaaS provider if the platform is provided in as a service. Also, have IT or an outside specialist perform a security audit to ensure it meets common security standards, of which ISO-27001 and SOC-2 are the two most important.

It’s also important to make sure the platform really understands the system it’s integrating with. If the no-code platform doesn’t understand the relationships between objects in the system it’s working with, it won’t know how to retrieve the right information in the right place, the no-code platform will be useless, and the business will have to bring IT to do development. General-purpose no-code privacy platforms typically lack the in-depth systems knowledge necessary to ensure full compliance.

No-code platforms can provide an elegant and efficient solution for compliance with data privacy regulations, allowing non-technical employees to build applications that seamlessly integrate with business processes. As long as the organization ensures that the no-code platform is secure and can deeply integrate with targeted systems, organizations can become compliant at a much lower cost in much less time.

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