ServiceNow is the leading cloud solution for the enterprise service management. It is designed as a single system or record which helps organizations to consolidate their service processes within one platform and quickly build new applications. Moreover, ServiceNow boasts over 99% uptime and outages are very rare so your data is very safe in the cloud.
The problem is that all the tools inside the platform including reporting, backups or Performance Analytics work extremely well for those using ServiceNow in isolation. However, ServiceNow is being implemented mostly by large enterprises with many other applications, existing IT environments and preferred company-wide solutions, and this is the situation where the single system of record is suddenly becoming only another piece of software, another data source.
By its cloud nature, it is much more complicated to work with the ServiceNow data outside of the cloud and making integrations directly with the production ServiceNow instance might have performance impacts, especially for bulk data. This is why many ServiceNow customers think of building their own read replicas to be able to work with the data on-premise.
Specifically, here are 3 reasons to keep independent copy of your ServiceNow data:
1. Reporting and Business Intelligence
What if you have an existing data warehouse? Do you have a standard reporting environment based on Tableau or SAP BO? In this case, ServiceNow is just one of the data sources for the reporting team and accessing the cloud instance is simply not flexible enough. Having a copy of the ServiceNow data in an on-premise database makes everything much easier.
One approach is to connect the reporting tool directly to the replicated ServiceNow database, the other approach is to use the replica as a staging area for further ETL processing such data mart loads or data blending.
2. Simplified Integrations
Data managed by an ITSM tool is important for many other application withing an IT environment of a company. Other tools need to work with the configuration database, user groups, assets or even incidents. The experience is that vast majority of applications working with ServiceNow data does not change the data at all. In other words, they just need the read-only data. It is an read-only ServiceNow integration.
In this case the best practice is to read the data from a mirror database instead of using ServiceNow API just to get the same records again and again.
3. Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery are closely related practices that describe an organization’s preparation for unforeseen risks to continued operations. Many organizations are required to have such plans. Having the ServiceNow data in a separate location is the vital part of these plans to cover scenarios such as “What if there is no ServiceNow anymore?”.
Replicate ServiceNow Data with SnowMirror
SnowMirror is a smart replication tool for ServiceNow. The data is loaded from a ServiceNow instance and stored into a relational database such as Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server, installed in a local environment. SnowMirror is simple to install and configure, follow the guide on how to evaluate. or watch some of our screen casts.
