Performance Considerations

Encrypting data with Shield Platform Encryption has minimal impact on the day-to-day performance of Salesforce for users. Salesforce recommends testing Shield Platform Encryption in a full copy sandbox under real-world conditions before enabling it in a production org.

Unnecessarily encrypting field data can impact functionality and performance, so it is a best practice to encrypt only the fields that are required to meet regulatory, security, and compliance needs. Encrypting a field can also impose limits on the values you store in it, particularly for longer fields or those with non-ASCII values. Queries against fields with case-insensitive deterministic encryption can perform poorly with large tables, so custom indexes are recommended for optimal query performance.