Establish Record Level Security in Salesforce

Note: Without Role hierarchy Record Level Security Cannot be established.Roles primarily control a user’s record-level access through role hierarchy and sharing rules.

Record-level security lets you give users access to some object records, but not others. Every record is owned by a user or a queue. The owner has full access to the record. In a hierarchy, users higher in the hierarchy always have the same access to users below them in the hierarchy. This access applies to records owned by users, as well as records shared with them.

To specify record-level security, set your organization-wide sharing settings, define a hierarchy, and create sharing rules.
1) Organization-wide sharing settings—The first step in record-level security is to determine the organization-wide sharing settings for each object. Organization-wide sharing settings specify the default level of access users have to each others’ records.

You use organization-wide sharing settings to lock down your data to the most restrictive level, and then use the other record-level security and sharing tools to selectively give access to other users. For example, let’s say users have object-level permissions to read and edit opportunities, and the organization-wide sharing setting is Read-Only. By default, those users can read all opportunity records, but can’t edit any unless they own the record or are granted additional permissions.

2) Role hierarchy—Once you’ve specified organization-wide sharing settings, the first way you can give wider access to records is with a role hierarchy. Similar to an organization chart, a role hierarchy represents a level of data access that a user or group of users needs. The role hierarchy ensures that users higher in the hierarchy always have access to the same data as people lower in their hierarchy, regardless of the organization-wide default settings. Role hierarchies don’t have to match your organization chart exactly. Instead, each role in the hierarchy should represent a level of data access that a user or group of users needs.

3) Sharing rules—Sharing rules let you make automatic exceptions to organization-wide sharing settings for particular sets of users, to give them access to records they don’t own or can’t normally see. Sharing rules, like role hierarchies, are only used to give additional users access to records—they can’t be stricter than your organization-wide default settings. 

4) Manual sharing—Sometimes it’s impossible to define a consistent group of users who need access to a particular set of records. In those situations, record owners can use manual sharing to give read and edit permissions to users who would not have access to the record any other way. Although manual sharing isn’t automated like organization-wide sharing settings, role hierarchies, or sharing rules, it gives record owners the flexibility to share particular records with users that need to see them.