Because SnowMirror has worked with IT professionals worldwide since 2012, and because we’re IT professionals ourselves, we know firsthand that when it comes to making software purchasing recommendations, management tends to overlook IT’s recommendations or place them on a lower priority.
This is why we decided to ask SnowMirror Consultant Pavel Müller for his suggestions on arguments IT professionals can make to their management about why replicating ServiceNow data should be a priority for their companies.
SnowMirror is a smart replication system that loads data from your ServiceNow instance and stores it in a local database in your local environment.
ServiceNow is an excellent platform, Müller says, and it gets better with every new release every six months, but one of the areas managers can improve on their ServiceNow investment is by offloading reporting functions to specialized reporting platforms such as Tableau, Qlik, PowerBI or others. “This allows the IT staff to create near-real-time dashboards that monitor key data in standardised formats that managers can use to make better decisions,” Müller said.
By feeding ServiceNow data into business intelligence platforms, managers can increase efficiency and save time and money on analysis, Müller explains. The BI platforms enable more flexible and powerful analytics and reporting, and by using SnowMirror to automatically send ServiceNow data to a data warehouse that feeds the BI platform, the data is cleaner and up to date.
“Offloading reporting is a very strong argument,” Müller says.
The second argument for SnowMirror is that it enables read-only integrations, which represent best practices for reporting databases, Müller adds, using online banking as an example. A bank would never allow the connection of a reporting tool directly to a live system, he says, and SnowMirror’s strength is that it never threatens the primary system.
A third compelling argument has to do with the build-or-buy decision many companies find themselves facing when it comes to ServiceNow replication, Müller said. “Lots of companies want to program something themselves, but it turns out to be more complicated than they think. Throughput and performance are hard problems – corner cases and glitches in scripts appear regularly,” he explains.
Another problem is that companies’ IT staff often severely underestimate maintenance costs when planning to build their own replication solutions. “Maintenance has to happen with every ServiceNow release – that means updating their in-house solution every six months to match those releases,” Müller says. “With SnowMirror, we guarantee compatibility with every ServiceNow release and make our updates available on the same schedule as the ServiceNow releases,” Müller adds.
SnowMirror also provides additional peace of mind when it comes to disaster recovery, Muller explained, because a copy of a company’s ServiceNow data is stored away from their cloud, meaning the company will be able to get back online faster.
“When you add these up, it really does make sense for companies to use SnowMirror for data replication, and we’re ready to work with companies to help them get the most out of their ServiceNow data” Müller says.
If you’d like to to talk with us about how SnowMirror can help your business get the most out of ServiceNow, please get in touch.
