What Exactly Is Salesforce Hyperforce And How Could It Benefit Your Company?

Since its founding, Salesforce has been committed to its customers to ensure high levels of security and performance. The success of this pioneer of cloud-based software is based on technologies that solidly support its customers. For more than 20 years it has stored the information of thousands of companies in its own data centers, but this was beginning to be insufficient.

A digital transformation is imperative for any company that wants to compete in today’s market. Automation requests are fast in the making, and Salesforce has made it a point to satisfy its customers as quickly as possible.

The potential of the public cloud has been revealed to Salesforce as the most efficient way to support the rapid growth of its clients’ businesses. Therefore, in December 2020, they announced Hyperforce, the public cloud architecture that has allowed them to reach new geographies.

What is Salesforce Hyperforce?

Hyperforce is Salesforce’s renewed infrastructure architecture, based on the consumption of public cloud services. It has been designed to offer customers a more powerful and easily scalable platform. In this new scenario, Salesforce does not manage physical resources. The only layers under its domain are: platform, clouds, applications and functionalities.

What is Public Cloud?

Public cloud refers to computing infrastructure that is owned and operated by a cloud service provider, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform. In the public cloud, computing resources, namely servers, storage and networks, are shared with users via the Internet. Conceptually it is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The most common use cases for IaaS include hosting and running applications, as well as data storage.

This approach allows Salesforce to focus all of its power on innovating and refining its products, diversifying its portfolio of services, and achieving the satisfaction of more and more customers around the world.

Hyperforce was designed with the best development practices that Salesforce has accumulated over its almost 25 years of experience.

Traditionally, Salesforce has hosted its customers’ instances on its own infrastructure, known as Salesforce Infrastructure. However, with Hyperforce, organizations can choose to run their Salesforce instances on a public cloud infrastructure of their choice, thus having more control over where their data is stored and processed.

Salesforce Customer 360 is now based on a completely revamped architecture platform that is more flexible, scalable, and efficient. Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Industries and many more solutions are now available from the world’s leading public clouds.

At no additional cost, you will be able to enjoy the benefits for your Salesforce organization of migrating to this new architecture . Here are some of them.

Main benefits of migrating to Salesforce Hyperforce

1- You will be able to choose where in the world you want to migrate your organization, thus reducing concerns about non-compliance with regional laws and regulations.

Hyperforce public cloud providers offer their services for various regions. It is beneficial for companies to select the region that is as close as possible to the organization. This greatly facilitates regional compliance with industry regulations and government legislation associated with information management. It should be noted that, before a migration, companies will be able to choose a location, but not the public cloud provider. However, not all applications are accessible from any region. This is something that must be taken into account before migrating.

2- You will be guaranteed that Salesforce will always have the infrastructure you need to scale your business quickly and sustainably.

Public cloud providers not only ensure that Salesforce, through Hyperforce, always has the necessary resources to support their customers’ growth, but also guarantees scalability in a sustainable way. Salesforce is committed to offering its customers infrastructures that are focused on 100% renewable energy, and providers oriented towards the goal of net zero carbon emissions in all its operations.

3- Your data will be as or more secure than before.

Hyperforce’s security architecture implements principles such as: least privilege, zero trust, and encryption of customer data. Least Privilege ensures that users have the minimum access necessary to perform their jobs. Zero trust is based on the thesis that the security of a complex network is always under both external and internal threats. This allows organizing strategies to face threats and mitigate their effects. Data encryption can handle data that is both stored on disks or in transit within a network.

4- Control over the privacy of your data and the data of your customers is guaranteed.

Hyperforce ensures that the standards and regulations associated with privacy in the cloud are respected. This guarantees that cloud service providers have the necessary procedures and controls in place to comply with legal obligations regarding the processing of private data. It also provides highly transparent information about how your data and that of your customers are collected and used.

5- It favors agile software development and performance in the execution of your applications.

With the Salesforce First-Party Data Center infrastructure architecture, organizations are contained in instances. These instances are assigned a certain amount of resources that are shared among several organizations. When an organization does not find the necessary resources in an instance to run properly, it is automatically migrated to another instance with less load. When these migrations occur, the organizations will become temporarily inaccessible. If an organization is frequently migrated due to the lack of infrastructure processing, this may hinder development tasks, updates, etc. Generally, sandboxes or test and development environments are located in instances with fewer resources, where they can undergo many migrations.

With Hyperforce, all of these performance and resource issues disappear as Salesforce no longer has to invest energy and effort in it. Instead, public cloud providers ensure that the infrastructure meets all the running needs of organizations regardless of whether they are test, development, or production environments. In addition, native integration of organizations with public clouds such as AWS can be very beneficial for development.

Requirements that you must meet if you want to migrate to Hyperforce

Although Hyperforce uses modern cloud-based technologies, it is designed to be compatible with previous versions of Salesforce. However, before you decide to migrate to Hyperforce, there are some good practices that you must follow. Compliance with these requirements guarantees the correct functioning of all the services you use from the new infrastructure. It is worth clarifying that many of these are not mandatory in Salesforce’s own architecture.

• Do not use direct references to specific instances in the custom code (hard-coded instance references) of a Salesforce organization. It is recommended not to use URLs that contain the instance name to avoid interruptions during routine maintenance. Use generic URLs instead. The implementation of “My Domain” is recommended. For example, login.salesforce.com or .my.salesforce.com.
• Do not use specific IP address lists included directly in the code (hard-coded IP allowlists) or an organization’s configuration. It is advisable to use more flexible, modern and secure approaches instead, such as:
  • The Allowlist Domains. Instead of whitelisting IP addresses, you can include Salesforce domain names, such as *.force.com.
  • Implement modern authentication and authorization (AuthN/AuthZ) for your web services and API endpoints to ensure that only your organization can access your network.
  • Implement Mutual Transport Layer Security (mTLS). This protocol guarantees secure links both from the client to the server and vice versa and the certificates of both entities are validated before establishing a connection. By implementing mTLS you can be absolutely sure that you are connecting to Salesforce and vice versa.

For customers who have an insurmountable business or compliance requirement for the IP allow list, or who need additional time to implement these best practices, Salesforce provides a Hyperforce IP list.

• Include the Service Name Indicator (SNI) for successful implementation of the HTTPS protocol. SNI is a security feature used in the configuration of SSL/TLS certificates that allows multiple websites to be hosted with different SSL/TLS certificates on the same IP address. This makes it easy to map specific domain names to SSL/TLS certificates in shared environments.To better understand how this works, you can see the TLS as the one in charge of delivering a package to a certain building and the SNI as the one that guarantees that the package arrives at the correct apartment in that building. In Hyperforce, each domain has a separate HTTPS certificate and thanks to the SNI in the mTLS ClientHello message, the exchange of the correct certificate in each case is guaranteed.

• You should not pin the certificates. This is considered an outdated security practice. Hyperforce rotates its certificates periodically. All Hyperforce certificates are chained to certificate authorities (CAs) included in the Mozilla server authentication (SSL/TLS) root certificate list.

• Use .NET version 5.0 or higher in organizations with Platform Events or Streaming Clients. Lower versions of .NET are not supported by Hyperforce RFC.

• Use version 37 or higher of the Streaming API. Organizations using Streaming API versions 23.0 – 36.0 may find error responses in Hyperforce.

In Hyperforce you will not find support for the functionality:

Non-compliant ApexREST service headers

ApexREST headers that do not comply with the HTTP header standard will not be supported by Hyperforce. For these cases Salesforce recommends its customers to update the ApexREST service headers to comply with the requirements of RFC 7230 by removing prohibited characters. Starting with the Spring ’24 release, Salesforce plans to automatically apply RFC 7230 to all environments.

As we mentioned, companies can choose to locate their organizations in regions close to where their business is carried out. By reducing the distance between data centers and end users, latency is also reduced, which has a positive impact on the performance of services.

It is important to note that Hyperforce does not replace existing Salesforce infrastructure, but rather provides an additional option to run Salesforce instances in the public cloud. Organizations can choose the option that best suits their specific needs and requirements.

We hope this post has helped you understand what Hyperforce is and how much it can benefit your company. If you would like to know more about the subject, do not hesitate to contact us at hello@theskyplanner.com.