Keeping tens of thousands of users of the MyGuildford portal safe

Case study: Guildford Borough Council

Keeping tens of thousands of users of the MyGuildford portal safe on Salesforce Experience and Service Clouds

Guildford Borough Council is a district within the county of Surrey. The Council currently supports roughly   140,000 residents through services such as planning, environmental health, housing and repairs, leisure services, and waste management. 

The customer portal, MyGuildford, built on Experience Cloud means over 55,000 registered users can digitally complete forms and submit requests.  

If the enquiry requires follow up, a case is created and sent to the Customer Service Team automatically, streamlining the process. Service Cloud provides MyGuildford with case and work order management functionality for full visibility into customer requests. The team can answer calls directly in Salesforce and create a case while simultaneously being presented with information via Knowledge to help the customer in the best way possible.

The project had a number of non-functional requirements like security. The MyGuildford portal has public forms that enable file uploads. The Council wanted to mitigate the risk of malicious files being uploaded to Salesforce. 

The Council chose WithSecure Cloud Protection for Salesforce as it was the only anti-virus product in the Salesforce marketplace that they could find to meet their requirements.  

Guildford Borough Council has the following advice for other Salesforce customers looking to address security challenges that they might face on the platform:  

“Not all clouds are equal, carefully evaluate the security controls of your cloud provider before deciding whether to proceed. A well-managed cloud service is likely to have a level of security monitoring and upgrades higher than your own organisation can provide on-premise. Use multi-factor authentication wherever possible to protect your organisation’s authentication to cloud services.”