David Baliles

Salesforce customers often leverage third-party or custom services to extend their orgs, and they do so with two common options: Connected Apps and External Services. Connected Apps let third-party vendors or custom code call Salesforce APIs using long-lived OAuth tokens, while External Services call vendor APIs through declarative configurations with vendor-managed hosting, scaling, and endpoint security. While both approaches deliver functionality, the dynamic security threat landscape challenges us to continuously improve the risk and governance of our applications.

Heroku AppLink improves your security model and provides a managed bridge between Salesforce and Heroku, so developers or vendors can deploy services in any language and expose them as native Salesforce actions. Heroku AppLink automatically handles authentication, service discovery, and request validation while its service mesh and short-lived credentials mean that your integrations no longer depend on stored credentials or exposed endpoints. Development teams can reuse existing code and libraries instead of rewriting in Apex, admins get centralized visibility into connections and authorizations, and security teams gain tighter trust boundaries across both Connected App and External Service scenarios.