Cloud storage has grown massively in popularity over the past few years, and it appears poised for even greater growth in the future. For this reason and more, SnowMirror supports cloud storage as part of its smart replication solution for ServiceNow.
According to market observers Datamation, the cloud storage market was estimated at $52 billion in 2020, and is forecast to maintain a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.6% from 2020 to 2027, reaching an estimated value of $204.4 billion by the end of it.
Cloud storage comes in many shapes and sizes, from solutions like Amazon S3 and Azure Storage, to more technically sophisticated data lake services such as Snowflake or Amazon Redshift. SnowMirror supports many of the leading cloud storage solutions, including storing ServiceNow data in cloud data lakes and storage.
With regard to data lakes, SnowMirror 5 supports replicating ServiceNow data into Amazon Redshift, Azure Synapse, and Snowflake cloud databases. Google BigQuery is coming in an upcoming release.
As for cloud storage, in addition to direct data lake support, SnowMirror 5 allows storing CSV files in cloud storage services such as Amazon S3, Azure Storage, and Google Cloud Storage. These data extracts can then be used for further processing.
It’s important to note that there are differences between backing up to a relational database and backing up to cloud storage. For example, when a record is updated in a relational database, the existing records in the database are updated. But for cloud storage, updated records are written into new files and existing files are kept intact. When a record is deleted in a relational database, users can utilize audit, differential and fast difference delete strategies, while in cloud storage deleted records can be identified using an audit delete strategy. Differential and fast delete strategies are not supported. We’ve got a helpful table showing the difference between relational database and cloud storage on our website.
Because cloud storage has several advantages for users, including flexibility and often price, it can be useful for companies to replicate their ServiceNow data to the cloud. For example, ServiceNow data can be combined with other sources in a data lake, or it can be used as part of a cloud-based business intelligence solution such as Microsoft PowerBI.
Once it is replicated from a company’s ServiceNow instance, companies’ ServiceNow data can be used to build powerful reports using powerful business intelligence tools such as Tableau or Microsoft PowerBI using data stored in a company’s cloud infrastructure. This unlocks tremendous potential and value, because the data that is replicated from ServiceNow is well-structured, consistent and of high quality.
SnowMirror makes it easy for companies to take full advantage of the value contained in ServiceNow data. With the addition of support for cloud storage and data lakes, the options for making optimal use of this data have increased exponentially.
If you’d like to further explore the possibilities of replicating ServiceNow data to the cloud, you can download a free 30-day trial version of SnowMirror by filling out this form on our website. We’ll then send you back an email with a 30-day trial license.
