What is Remote Site Settings in Salesforce?

4 min read

Nikita R.

Media-savvy content creator, with a curiosity for all Salesforce experiences.

Updated: Jan 13th, 2025

No organization wants a data breach! With so many third-party integrations that are essential for streamlining business processes in this fast-paced digital era, it’s essential to set procedures in place that let only trusted and authorized users or domains access your information.

Salesforce caters to this security problem with Remote Site Settings. Administrators can easily determine which external websites, services, and APIs can be accessed from Salesforce.

For more information on this essential topic, follow us in the below article as we dive further into Remote Site Settings from Salesforce.

Remote Site Settings Salesforce

Just to let you know, this term, “Salesforce Remote Site Settings,” is a bit outdated and is now called Remote Site or CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) settings in Salesforce.

Essentially, Remote Site is a security feature from Salesforce that lets you create HTTP requests to external websites and services. Please take a look at our table below to quickly learn about the Remote Site feature from Salesforce.

Important Facts	Details
Purpose	The purpose of Remote Site is to safely connect Salesforce with external software. Organizations use Remote Site to make outbound web service callouts and to connect Salesforce to web services and APIs.
Security	As a leading CRM solution provider, Salesforce provides powerful security measures. For example, by default, it blocks outbound HTTP requests to external sites. With Remote Site, you can decide which external sites are trustworthy. Salesforce automation will then make HTTP requests to those you have chosen.
Setup	To use Remote Site, you must have Salesforce administrator privileges activated. You can then continue to configure your Remote Site settings in the Setup menu.
Configuration	You will need to provide a site URL and specify if it is HTTP or HTTPS when you create a Remote Site Setting. Once configured, Salesforce will call the site when needed from your CRM platform.

The Remote Site feature from Salesforce is critical for giving you a secure and controlled way of accessing external resources from your CRM platform. This feature makes a huge difference in giving you a seamless experience to build integrations in your software stack so that you can interact with a host of external web services and applications.

Remote Site Security for Salesforce

When we speak about Remote Site Security, we typically start referring to the best practices and techniques used to ensure that Salesforce is accessed securely from various remote locations.

This topic is more important than ever in our era as countless startups and businesses of all sizes embrace remote working conditions.

Since Salesforce is a popular CRM platform used by over 150,000 organizations to manage sales, marketing, and customer service tasks, it’s also essential that they provide secure remote options to their clients.

If you are one of those organizations that need remote site security for Salesforce, take a look at some of the below tips you could leverage for your solutions.

Authenticate and Authorize your Users

Before you let your employees access Salesforce, make sure that they are properly authenticated. You can achieve this by drafting password policies, getting users to follow multi-factor authentication (MFA) processes, and adding single sign-on features.

After these safety measures are put in place, your employees can remotely log into Salesforce securely and seamlessly.

Secure Networks

It’s a best practice for all remote users to access Salesforce with a safe network. A good method to ensure that the connection is secure is to get users to use a Virtual Private Network (VPN). VPNs make it difficult for unauthorized users to intercept and steal your data.

IP Safelisting

You could also add IP safelisting measures to your remote logins. IP safelisting will restrict access to Salesforce based on IP addresses and ranges. Enabling this rule in your organization will prevent unauthorized users from accessing Salesforce from locations you do not trust or know.

And that’s it for Remote Site Security, but before we end our article, we know that Site Settings is also a super popular topic that Salesforce readers want to know more about.

We cover it below briefly. Let us know if you would like a more detailed explanation for your Salesforce solutions.

What are Site Settings in Salesforce?

With Salesforce Sites, you can create websites or applications that integrate directly with your customer relationship management platform. This solution is great as visitors to your website do not need to log in with a username and password to access content.

This means that all the content on your branded website will be public. With Salesforce, you get the option to choose a URL for your website and ensure it matches the brand of your business.

So, after you create your branded website, you can configure your site’s settings. These site settings refer to public access and user login, which can be set up before activating your website. Another site setting you can tackle, if you want, is to create a syndication feed for your website. This feed is useful when you need an error page for assigning standard errors.

If you want to learn how to configure site settings, make sure to check out the Configure Salesforce Sites article on the official Salesforce website.

What is a Connected App in Salesforce?

A connected app serves as a mechanism that allows external applications to link with Salesforce through APIs and recognized protocols like SAML, OAuth, and OpenID Connect. The use of connected app in Salesforce enables these protocols to perform authentication, authorization, and to facilitate single sign-on (SSO) capabilities for external applications.

Frequently Asked Questions

Named Credentials vs Remote Site Settings

What’s the difference between remote site settings and named credentials in Salesforce? When it comes to Salesforce terminology, remote site settings, and named credentials are security features. They both allow you to set up external integrations but have different uses and were created for different purposes.

What is the difference between remote site settings and connected app in Salesforce?

With Remote Site Settings, you can get Salesforce to integrate with external websites or services. On the other hand, Connected Apps lets you control how third-party applications connect to Salesforce.

How do I create a remote site setting in Apex Salesforce?

Create a remote site setting in Apex by using Metadata API.

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Thank you for taking the time to read this article on Remote Site Settings in Salesforce. If you would like more solutions for Salesforce or want to extend your digital experiences, make sure to check out Titan. Our no-code platform integrates 100% with Salesforce with end-to-end security. We have SSL Encryption that safeguards all your digital assets, both in transit and at rest.

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