Now that Halloween is here it may not be Michael Myers or Freddy Krueger who keeps IT administrators up at night. It may not even be Pennywise, the clown from the movie IT, or the evil dolls Chucky or Annabelle.
No, what keeps IT administrators up at night is the thought that their company’s data may be at risk, especially without backups. This is just as true for companies using cloud-based offerings such as ServiceNow or Salesforce as it is for solutions running on companies’ own infrastructure. In this way, a good replication solution such as SnowMirror is a key addition to a company’s overall data safety.
SnowMirror might help you and your team rest a bit easier. Here are some examples of real-world challenges for your ServiceNow operations:
- An error in a discovery script corrupting the whole configuration database preventing users from working with incidents.
- A power user importing data into a service catalog but incidentally overwriting hundreds of key items.
- An HR manager realizing that all data including documents of employees hired a year ago are missing and there is no way to recover these records.
- A ServiceNow developer that needs to export a large table to be able to import it into a development instance to perform an ad-hoc test
SnowMirror Backup can definitely help to make secure, off-cloud copies of your critical ServiceNow data. Our article, “How to back up ServiceNow data,” goes into much greater detail into both potential problem scenarios as well as where SnowMirror can be put to use, including backing up ServiceNow data on your premises, exporting data beyond ServiceNow’s limits, and transferring data between ServiceNow instances. It’s recommended reading for any IT manager seeking to provide the best possible solutions for their company, and to get much-needed peace of mind.
But back to the horror stories. Rick Furniss once said that “more systems have been wiped out by admins than any hacker could do in a lifetime,” and there may be something to that. The Internet is full of horror stories from IT professionals, some funny, some tragic and some expensive. One website even paraphrases Lennon and McCartney:
Yesterday,
All those backups seemed a waste of pay.
Now my database has gone away.
Oh I believe in yesterday.
Suddenly,
There’s not half the files there used to be,
And there’s a milestone hanging over me
The system crashed so suddenly.
I pushed something wrong
What it was I could not say.
Now all my data’s gone
and I long for yesterday-ay-ay-ay.
Yesterday,
The need for back-ups seemed so far away.
I knew my data was all here to stay,
Now I believe in yesterday.
There’s a pretty funny Reddit thread about “sysadmin horror stories,” and just about every IT professional has similar tales, most of which only come out after a few adult beverages.
Sometimes data loss scenarios are tragedy and comedy in one, as is evidenced by what happened to the company Gitlab. To their CEO’s credit, they were at least transparent about what happened and the steps they took to get back online.
If you’d like to to talk with us about how SnowMirror can help your business get the most out of ServiceNow, get in touch <here>.
