Welcome back to another dive into the Salesforce Clouds! If you’re new to our Head in the Clouds series, you can take a look at the full list of Clouds we’ve covered.
This time, we’re looking at Salesforce Government Cloud so stick around to learn more!
What is Salesforce Government Cloud?
Salesforce Government Cloud is a bespoke, securely partitioned instance of the Salesforce 360 platform which offers an integrated customer relationship management (CRM) platform. It’s aimed at:
- US federal government
- Local government customers
- US government contractors
- Public sector
- Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs)
Why does Salesforce Government Cloud exist?
Salesforce explains the challenges facing government authorities and public offices in a Trailhead module:
“In the modern digital landscape of online applications, customer self-service, and automated workflows, government authorities and public offices must rethink and reinvent their task flows. The ultimate goal for any public sector authority is to increase constituent engagement and streamline internal workflows. Public Sector Solutions from Salesforce do just that.”
Government Cloud’s main objective is to provide government entities with an industry-leading, security-compliant platform on which to scale and secure resources in order to complete their mission effectively. We’ll dive into the specifics of how it does this later.
Quick glossary
Let’s take a minute to dive into some helpful terms and definitions:
Government Cloud: a bespoke-for-government and public sector suite of tools built on the Salesforce CRM platform. Government Cloud is designed for agencies around the world including central government, local government, police and healthcare. Salesforce Government Cloud maintains a FedRAMP Agency Authority to Operate (ATO) at the Moderate Security Impact Level.
Government Cloud Plus: runs on AWS GovCloud (US), a dedicated instance of Salesforce’s Government Cloud designed to support the security needs of U.S. government agencies and contractors. It has achieved a FedRAMP Provisional Authority to Operate (P-ATO) at the High Security Impact Level.
Check out this comparison chart of the differences between Government Cloud and Government Cloud Plus.
FedRAMP at High / Moderate Security Impact Level: a differentiator between Government Cloud and Government Cloud Plus. Government Cloud Plus is compliant to the highest level whereas Government Cloud is compliant to the Moderate level. This means FedRAMP has evaluated these cloud services via a significant, thorough security and compliance review that is annually reassessed. In short, having authority to operate at this highest security level allows Salesforce Government Cloud Plus customers to use Salesforce for the most sensitive, unclassified data.
What can you do with Salesforce Government Cloud?
Since Government Cloud is already built on Salesforce and its 360 CRM, it casts a wide net in what it can provide for the public and government sector. Salesforce offers out-of-the-box security-compliant applications designed for government service.
Here are some of the applications and functionality available with Government Cloud:
- Emergency response management
- License and permit approvals processes
- Inspections management applications
- Grants management applications
- Contact Centre functionality
- Scalable call, web, chat and text response systems
- Centralised communication with stakeholders across email, SMS and social platforms
- The power to give public servants a 360-degree view of citizens, stakeholders and partners in a single source of truth – Salesforce CRM!
💡 Did you know: The UK Government has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Salesforce to enable the UK public sector to benefit from access to Salesforce products and citizens.
Why should you use Salesforce Government Cloud?
Overall, there’s clearly a lot that you can do with Salesforce Government Cloud and Government Cloud Plus. Since governments are vast, multifaceted, and public-facing institutions, Salesforce provides a single source of truth digitally with Government Cloud to empower governmental and public sector employees to accelerate their mission impact. There are other benefits too:
- Low code / no code Saas platform that integrates with legacy systems
- Gain access to a broad range of solutions from contact centres to case management to citizen engagement and many more
- Security-first infrastructure compliant with the demands of government
- See time to value in days not years
Learn more from these Salesforce demo videos.
Salesforce Government Cloud and ProvenWorks in action
ProvenWorks is a Salesforce Partner offering a number of solutions that enhance out-of-the-box Salesforce functionality. We have customers around the world who are government entities with interesting use cases around importing.
Empower external stakeholders, business entities and programmes to import data to your Salesforce org quickly and securely.
Whether you are reporting on local outreach programmes, analysing state-wide employment data or outsourcing contracts for efficiency, you need to collect all that data into your single source of truth – Salesforce CRM.
Our spreadsheet data importing solution, SimpleImport, empowers government entities who want to streamline data input by removing manual workload and empowering users to import themselves. Unlike security-compromising solutions access via third-party website or inefficient admin-only tools, use SimpleImport directly from your Salesforce org or a digital experience.
Contact us today to learn more about how we can support your mission impact!
Reach out to the ProvenWorks team and find out more about our solutions and how we can help meet your Salesforce needs.
So what’s next? The choice is yours.
You can either go back to the first blog in our Head in the Clouds series: What is Experience Cloud and what can you do with it? Or… you can access all the blogs in the Head in the Clouds series.