• by Ray Schultz , April 5, 2022

Salesforce has acquired Phennecs, a firm that offers privacy-compliance tools built on the Salesforce platform, the company said on Monday. Terms were not disclosed. 

The companies have had an OEM relationship for several years, and have co-developed products that are exclusively sold on the Salesforce platform. 

Phennecs provides tools for scrubbing sandbox environments of personally identifying information (PI) and for helping brands comply with such laws as PCI, GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA, Christine Marshall writes on SalesforceBen. 

The Phennecs interface is designed for use by team members ranging from admins to developers. 

The tool ensures that Salesforce sandbox environments are anonymized or pseudonymized, using clicks instead of code. 

“You only need to configure it once in your production instance, making it easier to replicate and reducing the time and effort spent when handling data privacy in your sandboxes,” Marshall writes.

Marshal notes that “Salesforce sandboxes are critical to the development and testing of new solutions and require data to do so.”

However, “regulations state that sensitive personal information should not be visible in these environments,” Marshall says. “Removing or hiding this data can be time-consuming and difficult.”

Marshall adds: "Anything that reduces development time and helps us with data compliance gets a thumbs up from us."