Salesforce.com Inc. wants to help Heroku customers protect their workloads more easily.

To that end, the cloud giant today released a security toolkit for the application platform that aims to reduce the amount of work involved in meeting compliance standards. It’s modeled after Salesforce Shield, the encryption and monitoring bundle that the company sells for its flagship customer relationship management service.

Dubbed Heroku Shield, the toolkit consists of three components each designed to address a different security requirement. The first is Private Spaces, a service originally launched last year that provides the ability to run applications in a dedicated environment with its own virtual network. This arrangement gives companies more control over the flow of traffic than what is provided in regular deployments that share infrastructure with other users’ workloads.

Heroku Shield complements the core networking features with a set of controls that provide the ability to set security rules the applications running in a Private Space. Companies can provision workload-specific authentication tokens to limit who can access what service, restrict IP addresses to a specific number range and require developers to employ strong encryption.

The final component is a logging tool for keeping track of the activity in a deployment. Instead of having to manually set up an event capture mechanism for each application, developers can use Heroku Shield to centrally collect user interactions and send them to a designated archive only accessible by authorized staff. According to Salesforce, this feature is meant to ensure that logging operations stay consistent as services change over time.

Heroku Shield is geared mainly toward companies in regulated industries such as banks and hospitals that have strict legal obligations when it comes cybersecurity. However, the toolkit should also hold appeal for regular enterprises that wish to take extra precautions to protect their cloud applications. Breach prevention has taken on new importance in recent years as a result of the increasing intensity with which hackers are targeting corporate infrastructure. 

Image: Salesforce