Perspectium How to Improve ServiceNow Data Availability

Improving ServiceNow data availability helps organizations make more productive use of ServiceNow data in analysis, reporting and more. 

The most effective way to improve ServiceNow data availability, is to integrate ServiceNow with an external database. 

Without integrating the platform, data within ServiceNow is siloed, and difficult to distribute among the systems and people that can utilize it. 

What is Data Availability?

Data availability describes the accessibility of ready-to-use data. As such, improving the availability of data requires a combination of systems and processes that ensure data is stored, accessible and transformed into a format that the organization can readily use.

Continuity is also a tenant of data availability, with systems and processes supporting backup and disaster recovery integral to ensuring data is available amidst disruption. 

Good data availability ensures seamless operations with uninterrupted access to data. Data that is not readily available in the proper format can impede operations such as service delivery, and lead to disruptions in internal processes, resulting in the loss of time and revenue. 

How ServiceNow-to-database Integrations Improve ServiceNow Data Availability

With a ServiceNow-to-database integration, organizations can store and access ServiceNow data in a more suitable environment.

Without integrating ServiceNow, employees are often forced into ill-advised workarounds – such as login credential sharing – to access and use ServiceNow data. Organizations also suffer in terms of productivity, as manual methods of extracting and replicating data need to be employed to get data to where it needs to be. 

ServiceNow-to-database integrations allow organizations to easily manage ServiceNow data from multiple departments with distinct requirements, while reserving access to sensitive data to approved stakeholders only. 

This encourages better and more secure data democratization, allowing employees controlled, self-service access to the database to support them in functions such as analysis, reporting AI, ML, data lake building, and data warehousing.

Improve ServiceNow Data Availability with Dynamic, Real-time Data Delivery

With the right method of integration, organizations can even benefit from dynamic, real-time data delivery, ensuring data replicated from ServiceNow reflects an up-to-date view of the organization. 

With dynamic, real-time data delivery, organizations can obtain timely and accurate reflections of business operations through reports and analysis by ensuring that data reaches the right recipients at the right time and in the right format. This fosters informed decision-making by delivering an up-to-date view of organizational metrics.

The biggest advantage of integrating ServiceNow with best-in-class data repositories is that these are well-supported by dedicated business solutions that use and/or manipulate data. Thus, by replicating ServiceNow data to an external database, users can easily access it for use cases such as BI, AL, ML, and reporting.

Maintain Data Availability with Backup and Disaster Recovery

As well as integrating ServiceNow with external databases, organizations should also implement sufficient processes and systems for managing and creating backups. 

While ServiceNow provide some functionality for backup and disaster recovery, users have very little control over the process. Limitations to ServiceNow’s default backup capabilities include:

• No control over when backups are created
• No control over how long backups are retained
• No control over what is included in a backup
• No control over what is restored from a backup 

Fortunately, ServiceNow’s backup functionality can be upgraded with a purpose-built, ServiceNow-native backup and restore solution.

With greater control over the backup process, organizations are better equipped to maintain high levels of data availability throughout disruptive events such as data loss and corruption.  

Use Cases for Improving the Availability of ServiceNow Data

Improving the availability of ServiceNow data allows organizations to make better use of ServiceNow data in various use cases, including:

• Replicating ServiceNow data in third-party solutions for improved reporting, analysis and more

Integrating ServiceNow with an external database allows organizations to easily feed data into third-party solutions. While ServiceNow has some support for analysis and reporting, the features are limited and many organizations prefer to utilize purpose-built solutions for more informed analysis, reports and insight. 

This is a huge benefit to the many organizations that have already invested in purpose built reporting, analysis and business intelligence solutions such as Tableau and Power BI. Data teams and the various departments that utilize data can work with ServiceNow data within the purpose-built tools with which they have expertise.

Organizations benefit from a wider range of data visualization options; more complex reporting scenarios; and a higher-throughput of data into solutions that benefit from high-quality, regular data input such as AI and ML tools.

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• Dashboards, and combining ServiceNow data with other sources

Despite its popularity, the ServiceNow platform is a data silo that can limit the insight the platform can provide.

ServiceNow-to-database integrations facilitate more contextualized analysis, reporting and intelligence by allowing for ServiceNow data to be combined with other sources. 

For example, organizations are better placed to make informed decisions on data that originates in disparate systems, such as the impact time-to-resolution has on customer retention. 

Organizations can also include ServiceNow data in enterprise dashboards to enhance the visualization and interpretation of key metrics. It streamlines reporting, empowering different teams to leverage diverse tools and platforms for effective collaboration and strategic planning. 

With ServiceNow data made available in an external repository, it can be more easily fed into purpose-built solutions for analysis, reporting and more.

• Self-service access through data democratization

Data democratization empowers individuals with self-service access to vital data for everyday business operations. 

For organizations using ServiceNow, a robust data democratization strategy ensures the widespread availability of ServiceNow data for stakeholders, supported by automated integrations that securely transfer the right data across systems. 

This improves collaboration and minimizes reliance on manual processes, reducing the risk of security breaches, while maintaining data quality.

Data democratization optimizes data value and is highly beneficial for projects and teams engaging in extensive data consumption, spanning areas like AI, BI, ML, reporting and analysis, and predictive analytics. 

Approved users can easily access necessary data and extract real-time insights, unlocking its true value. By promoting real-time analysis and identifying emerging trends and opportunities, data democratization provides a competitive edge in the market and helps deliver improved customer experiences.

• Improved ServiceNow performance

Replicating ServiceNow data to an external database can vastly improve the performance of ServiceNow. The more data within the ServiceNow platform, the more system resources are required to query the data and return results. 

This directly impacts functions including reporting, dashboards and more. With a lot of data in ServiceNow, such functions are slowed, and can even become unresponsive, causing significant delays to data delivery. 

However, there is also a knock on effect to primary ServiceNow functions, that can become unresponsive when the platform is querying the database. 

Many organizations that experience this dynamic are forced into workarounds such as only allowing tasks such as generating reports outside of operational hours.

Not only does this limit the availability of data and its timely delivery, but it also risks outright failure – such as system time outs – meaning the data, insights, etc., are still not ready for use when operational hours resume. 

By replicating ServiceNow data within an external database, organizations can instead use purpose-built solutions to create reports, dashboards, etc., allowing ServiceNow to operate more efficiently. They also avoid the need for workarounds such as generating reports outside of operational hours.

• Real-time data

Modern organizations are driven by real-time insights and today, IT leaders are consciously switching to dynamic dashboards from static reports for more comprehensive and up-to-date insight. 

By integrating ServiceNow data with external databases, it can be fed in real-time into third-party dynamic dashboards, providing optimal insights that reflect an up-to-date view of the whole organization. 

After all, the goal is to provide users with the right data at the right time in formats conducive to informed decision-making. Such an integration improves the organization’s agility and responsiveness, equipping decision-makers with a real-time data view. 

Benefits of High Data Availability

By integrating ServiceNow with external tools/solutions, organizations can make business-critical data available and accessible to a wider audience rather than limiting access to a few select individuals or teams. 

• Data-driven decision-making – When ServiceNow data is readily accessible to key decision-makers, they can make more informed decisions. They can access real-time data and insights to better understand the business’s current state and identify the most pressing areas for improvement.
• Enhance collaboration – Opening up access to ServiceNow data via an external database fosters collaboration and communication across teams within the organization. This accessibility allows different teams and professionals to collaborate on shared projects, promoting a unified approach and accelerating solutions to real-world challenges.
• Boost productivity – More accessible ServiceNow data inevitably enhances productivity by enabling stakeholders to retrieve and analyze necessary information for their specific needs. This streamlined approach reduces the time spent on data collection, allowing more focus on value-added activities.
• Enhance accountability – Increased transparency and visibility into organizational data provide valuable insights for identifying areas of improvement. This improved visibility empowers managers and employees to track their progress, fostering a culture of accountability as organizational data becomes more visible.
• Elevate employee and customer experiences – Data accessibility eliminates redundant manual processes and aligns data across systems, creating a seamless collaborative experience for employees. Professionals can enrich their expertise, resulting in better outcomes. Additionally, the immediate availability of data allows teams to promptly respond to customer requests and incidents, significantly reducing the time-to-resolution for open cases.
• Ensure data accuracy – High data availability promotes self-service access and encourages accurate reporting. Integrations supporting self-service reporting reduce reliance on manual data entry and analysis, ensuring the reliability and consistency of data.

Improving the Availability of ServiceNow Data, with Perspectium

Perspectium provides ServiceNow-native solutions and a managed service for integrating and replicating massive amounts of ServiceNow data, without impacting performance.

• See also: Perspectium Named a Top 10 ServiceNow Solution

As a managed service, Perspectium implements and maintains the solution, ensuring its customers’ internal resources can be used efficiently, focussing on value-adding initiatives.

Created by ServiceNow’s founding developer, David Loo, Perspectium was developed to overcome common hurdles with improving the availability of ServiceNow data. As such, Perspectium applications are designed for high-throughput and on-time data delivery.

As a native solution, Perspectium’s tools are embedded within the ServiceNow UI, and do not require web services or API calls that consume ServiceNow’s operational bandwidth.

This means users have an easy-to-use, no code solution for replicating and integrating ServiceNow that does not impede the platform’s performance. 

Perspectium’s DataSync solution extracts and replicates data to external repositories via push technology and a message broker system (MBS). This approach facilitates massive throughput and frictionless integration between ServiceNow and data-intensive applications for performance reporting, analytics, AI, BI, ML, etc. 

Speaking to the quality of Perspectium’s solution and services, ServiceNow uses Perspectium internally. 

Rather than working with internally developed solutions such as the IntegrationHub, ServiceNow relies on Perspectium to transfer data from numerous production instances to external databases that teams around the organization can access.

To learn more about how Perspectium ensures high data availability and accessibility, talk to our experts today!

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DataSync is an application and managed service, allowing ServiceNow users to extract and replicate over 1 billion records per month.
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The Biggest ServiceNow Integration Challenges and Their Solutions

 

A number of common ServiceNow integration challenges often lead to costly technical debt and poor availability of ServiceNow data around the enterprise. 

Such challenges are most prevalent when organizations do not understand the best method of integration for their requirements.

• See also: Choosing the Right Integration Approach

Top ServiceNow Integration Challenges

Organizations that implement ServiceNow integrations to extract and transfer massive data volumes face common data integration challenges, including the following:

1. Working with the wrong integration method and/or integration provider for your requirements

When ServiceNow integrations are not carefully planned, organizations can face significant sunk costs and technical debt as they waste time, resources and money on implementing an integration that is not fit for purpose. 

This often happens when an organization chooses to build an integration in-house, or implement a packaged integration solution without sufficient internal resources. 

In this case, many organizations underestimate the amount of resources implementing the integration and its subsequent maintenance will require. The resulting technical debt spiral sees organizations fighting to make integrations work, rather than benefiting from the integration working for them.

Many organizations also fail to consider whether the integration will effectively scale as their usage of ServiceNow increases over time. 

This often leads to a dynamic where the chosen method of integration cannot meet the organizations requirements for throughput, leading to poor ServiceNow performance and poor availability of ServiceNow data. 

API and web services-based integrations are common culprits for performance degradation, as they consume ServiceNow’s operational bandwidth whilst making inefficient, external calls to the platform to initiate data transfers.

Choosing the Right Integration Approach

Data volume, availability and security are just some of the things to consider when choosing an integration approach. The “right” approach will depend on your particular needs …

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Best practice solution: Carefully planning integrations can limit the potential for implementing the wrong type of integration, or working with the wrong type of provider.

When formulating a list of requirements for the integration, an organization should first consider their available resources e.g. the availability of internal developers and the time available to train employees on how to use the integration. 

Organizations should also consider current levels of ServiceNow usage, and the pace in which their usage of ServiceNow might scale. 

If an organization has concerns about any of the above, then working with an integration-as-a-service provider will avoid burdening internal resources with implementation and maintenance, and help ensure the integration can scale over time. 

2. Integration security

While the ServiceNow platform boasts stringent security protocols, the same levels of security cannot be guaranteed by third-party and custom-built integrations.

Organizations need to ensure the implementation of an integration meets their requirements in terms of security and does not expose them to greater risk.

For example, API integrations for ServiceNow require an external application to make calls to the ServiceNow platform. Particularly when poorly configured, API integrations can lead to breaches and resource consumption-based system failure.

This challenge is made more significant when implementing and maintaining integrations internally. Time constraints often place a heavy burden on the integration team, increasing the likelihood of poor configuration contributing to security issues.

Best practice solution: Before starting a ServiceNow integration project, an organization should evaluate its own security requirements, and whether they have the resources to meet them now and in the future.

Working with expert integration providers will mitigate such security risks. However, organizations should carefully evaluate the method of integration offered by the provider. 

If there are concerns about the security of API integrations, then a ServiceNow-native integration solution – where insecure, external calls to the platform are a non-factor – should be considered. For such organizations, integrations facilitated by Push Technology are recommended. 

• See also: Keeping Your ServiceNow Integrations Secure

3. Over-customized workflows and processes

The extent to which ServiceNow can be customized is one of the driving forces behind the platforms popularity.

However, excessive customization of workflows and processes can limit scalability and make ServiceNow more difficult to work with over time. Particularly when customizations are made to overcome short-term issues, without considering the longer term implications.

When a workflow is overly customized, it needs custom code and processes for updates, leading to cost-intensive maintenance and prolonged upgrade cycles.

Over-customization can also lead to poor ServiceNow performance, leading to a poor user experience and slow queries that impact reporting, ServiceNow data availability and more.

Best practice solution: With careful planning, organizations can limit the amount of customization required to make ServiceNow work for them. For example, instead of implementing numerous point-to-point integrations to connect ServiceNow to other solutions, organizations should integrate the platform with an external database.

The external database can then be used to feed ServiceNow data into other solutions, without compromising ServiceNow’s performance.

This process is far more efficient, as the consumption of ServiceNow’s system resources can be limited, and data can be retrieved from a system optimized for better data availability. 

To learn more about integrations that replicate ServiceNow data to external databases, check out this ServiceNow partner webinar: How to Replicate ServiceNow Data to Your External Database in Real-time!

• See also: Slow ServiceNow Instance Performance Could be Due to Over-Customization

4. Inadequate Professional Support and Training

After implementating an integration, errors may surface that require input from expert developers. 

Many organizations do not have these resources available internally, and those that do, often require such professionals to work on other tasks. 

Custom-built integrations in particular require more specific expertise. New hires using ServiceNow will need to be trained to interact with the integration to prevent new errors occurring. When recruiting developers, organizations have to find developers with expertise in the type of integration in place, limiting the talent pool.

Without the right resources available to support a ServiceNow integration, organizations will typically face a range of issues from poor instance performance to poor data availability.

Best practice solution: Organizations that opt to work with integration providers must ensure the vendor supplies sufficient support for implementing and maintaining the integration.

Organizations that opt to implement, manage and maintain integrations internally, must ensure they have the resources on hand to do so, and the capacity to train existing and future employees.

Working with integration service providers that implement and maintain the integration, and guarantee 24/7 x 365 support will help organizations avoid such ServiceNow integration challenges.

5. Challenges from Staff Turnover and its Impact on Integration Projects

When organizations choose to develop custom integrations in-house, they expose themselves to the risk of integration failure if the developers responsible for the project depart. This scenario can result in the integration becoming a form of technical debt, with 49% of organizations identifying developer turnover as a source of technical debt.

Proper documentation of the integration and its related processes is crucial to mitigate such issues. However, this approach alone has limitations, as documentation may not capture all the intricate details of the architecture and processes in their entirety. 

Also, if a member from the integration support team leaves, the organization must hire recruits with a specific skill set to maintain continuity for the integration, which is often easier said than done. 

Best practice solution: To ensure the on-going continuity and availability of integrations, it is recommended that organizations offload their maintenance and support requirements to expert integration providers.

This improves operational resilience, insulating integrations from developer turnover related issues.  

6. Lack of Real-Time Data 

While ServiceNow offers inbuilt analytics and reporting tools, organizations seeking advanced reporting features usually integrate it with dedicated analytics/BI tools.

This allows teams to remove data from its silo within ServiceNow, combine it with other data sources and allow teams across the enterprise to produce more in-depth insight. 

However, the quality of such insight is often undermined by a lack of real-time data. Without support for real-time data transfers, organizations time-sensitive analysis requirements cannot be met, leading to outdated and potentially misleading reports. 

Web services and API-based integrations often have significant limitations for transferring data in bulk, and on time. Since exporting huge data volumes consumes significant system resources, the process can be slow and prevent data providing an up-to-date view of the enterprise.

Best practice solution: To address this issue, organizations should seek out native integration solutions that enable near real-time and real-time data access for advanced analytics and reporting.

Integration solutions that support high-throughput, real-time data transfers can help organizations avoid this ServiceNow integration challenge.

To support organizations with high throughput requirements, ServiceNow integration partner Perspectium provides a solution capable of transferring over 1 billion records per month.

7. Performance Issues Increase Risks of Downtime, Data Loss, and Failure 

As mentioned earlier, many ServiceNow integrations rely on web services or API calls to extract data, causing significant performance impact when transferring large data volumes.

This is because web services and APIs compete for ServiceNow’s bandwidth to operate. Generally, teams employ workaround strategies, like running bulk exports during non-working hours. 

Besides generating obsolete or stale data insights, bulk exports can be so time-consuming that reports may remain incomplete when the business hours resume or may even time out, risking data loss.

ServiceNow performance degradation also hinders integration testing. Organizations might conduct tests at low data volumes to mitigate performance issues. However, this doesn’t guarantee that the integration will function optimally as data volumes scale. 

Best practice solution: Tackling performance related ServiceNow integration challenges such as integration failure and poor data availability requires an integration solution that can meet throughput demands. 

For instance, Perspectium is a native IaaS solution designed exclusively for ServiceNow integrations. Its DataSync tool can smoothly extract and transfer over 1 billion ServiceNow per month.

It achieves this via its native installation within ServiceNow, meaning data transfers can be initiated via Push Technology – rather than web services/API – for more more efficient integrations that do not drain the ServiceNow’s operational bandwidth. 

• See also: Troubleshooting ServiceNow Performance Degradation

Overcome ServiceNow Integrations with Perspectium

Designed by ServiceNow’s founding developer, David Loo, Perspectium is a ServiceNow-native integration solution and fully managed service for managing ServiceNow data. 

Thanks to its ServiceNow-native delivery, its founder’s understanding of the ServiceNow architecture, and its as-a-service model, Perspectium users have a means of integrating data without degrading ServiceNow’s performance, and without requiring internal resources to keep it operational. 

Perspectium handles everything from implementation to maintenance, and then provides support 24/7 x 365 to ensure the integrations stay operational. 

Perspectium’s DataSync application facilitates seamless extraction and replication of large volumes of ServiceNow data in realtime, and both dynamically and in-bulk. 

Thanks to its Push Technology-powered integrations, Perspectium users avoid the performance pitfalls of API calls and other similar technologies.

Because of this, with DataSync, ServiceNow’s export limits do not apply, and users can replicate over a billion ServiceNow records per month to a data repository of their choice.

The chosen repository can then easily feed data into a range of other solutions such as dedicated analytics, reporting, ML, and BI tools that improve the ROI of ServiceNow and its data. 

While Perspectium is delivered as a managed service, the user retains complete control of their data – what data they wish to replicate, where, and when – and encryption and obfuscation technology provides organizations with confidence in their data’s security. 

With Perspectium, you can stop fighting to make integrations work, and enjoy a ServiceNow integration that works for your organization.

Learn more about our integration and data replication methodologies by speaking with our experts today!

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ServiceNow Data Replication: A Guide to Replicating Data to Third-Party Systems

 

Having a robust ServiceNow data replication strategy helps organizations make more use of ServiceNow data, and make it more available to employees and departments without ServiceNow licenses. 

In ServiceNow, data replication is particularly crucial to ensure high data availability, self-service access via external databases, improved analysis & reporting, and minimal scope for data loss.

What is Data Replication?

Essentially, data replication involves creating multiple data copies across different locations and storage devices. It is commonly associated with preventing data loss in the event of disaster.

However, in practice the process supports a range of use cases including integrating a platform such as ServiceNow with third-party systems.

Data replication is particularly necessary when working with data in siloed systems. This is because data stored within siloed systems is often required for use by departments/employees without direct access to systems.

In this case, data replication plays a key part in ensuring that the right data reaches the right stakeholders, at the right time.

What Is the Difference Between Data Replication and Data Synchronization?

There is significant crossover between data replication and data synchronization. Both facilitate types of integration. Understanding the distinction will help organizations implement the best possible integration, replication and/or synchronization strategy and solutions. 

Data replication copies data from its system or datastore of origin, and stores it in another system, or multiple systems. It serves use cases such as integrations with third-party systems, improving data availability, enabling data democratization (self-service access), and protecting data against corruption and loss. 

The process does not inherently involve maintaining on-going consistency between original data and its subsequent copies. For example, backup and disaster recovery is enabled by data replication, and requires replicated data to reflect a historical record of data that can be recovered in the event of loss or corruption. 

In contrast, data synchronization ensures that data stored across multiple locations is kept in-sync and up-to-date. It removes the need for manual input and redundant processes in maintaining up to date and consistent databases, mitigating the potential for human error. 

Data replication is involved in data synchronization, but not all data replication solutions are equipped to meet the needs of a data synchronization strategy. For typical synchronization use cases, bi-directional replication is required, and many enterprises require the replication of data to occur in real-time.

Data synchronization plays a key role in enabling eBonding integrations between multiple solutions.

• See also: What is ServiceNow eBonding?

The Benefits of ServiceNow Data Replication

ServiceNow data replication is particularly beneficial to organizations using the platform, as the solution is notoriously difficult to extract data from.

The ServiceNow platform is a suite of solutions that provide a number of ways to manipulate, use and analyze data. As such, there is little incentive for the organization to build, deliver and maintain robust data extraction or replication features.

However, in practice, organizations often use a number of solutions that can make better use of ServiceNow data, combining its insight with data from other sources for more in-depth insight and analysis. 

Many organizations also require more control over how their data is stored, such as the creation of backups and where the resulting data is stored.

The key benefits of ServiceNow data replication to third-party systems are as follows:

• Self-service access and data democratization: Replicating ServiceNow data to an external system can help organizations more easily distribute data throughout the enterprise, without needing to purchase additional ServiceNow licenses and educate additional employees as to how the platform can and should be used.
• Combining ServiceNow data with other data sources: By making ServiceNow data available in an external database, organizations can interpret ServiceNow data in context with the wider enterprise for more in-depth reporting, analysis and more.
• Feeding data into third-party solutions: Data replication is required to feed ServiceNow data into third-party solutions such as analysis, reporting, artificial intelligence, business intelligence, and machine learning.
• Enhanced application reliability: Data replication ensures uninterrupted data availability, reducing downtime and bolstering system reliability, even during hardware failures or interruptions.
• Accelerated data access: Multiple data copies across various locations reduce latency, optimizing data retrieval, especially for remote teams and users.
• Creating backups and enabling data recovery: Data replication can be used to create multiple copies of data as “snapshots“, improving disaster recovery and ensuring up-to-date data access during failures. 

ServiceNow Instance Data Replication (IDR) vs. IntegrationHub

ServiceNow Instance Data Replication (IDR) is available to users of the platform. However, its use cases align more closely with data synchronization than replication. 

Users are unable to use IDR to copy data in the platform, and replicate it to third-party systems. 

Instead, IDR provides ServiceNow users with a means of mirroring data in a “producer” instance, to connected “consumer” instances to keep them in sync.

ServiceNow’s solution for replicating data to third-party systems is the API-enabled IntegrationHub. However, users should be aware of ServiceNow IntegrationHub limitations, as it falls short of many organizations requirements.

Limitations of ServiceNow IntegrationHub

IntegrationHub allows users to replicate data to third-party solutions. But many organizations’ requirements go beyond its capabilities, and organizations making significant use of ServiceNow will likely scale beyond what the IntegrationHub can manage.

• Resource depleting, multi-step processes: Even for basic operations, several actions and steps must be pieced together, putting a strain on users managing the process.
• Bidirectional integrations are difficult to set up: IDR cannot be used for data synchronization/eBonding use cases without significant configuration requirements in the connected system.
• Support for basic operations only: Pre-configured data replication scenarios are made available via spokes – logical groupings of actions that facilitate data replication for integrating ServiceNow. While there are many spokes, covering a range of third-party solutions, they typically each support only a handful of actions. Custom spokes can be built, but many organizations use ServiceNow for its low-code functionality, and do not have the resources to effectively build them. 

Speaking to the limitations of the IntegrationHub, ServiceNow themselves use DataSync by Perspectium internally to meet their own requirements for data availability and throughput.

How ServiceNow use Perspectium’s Performance Impact-Free Integration Applications

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Key Features of a Good ServiceNow Data Replication Strategy

Identify and document business needs 

Identifying and documenting the business needs helps organizations choose the right data replication method, and avoid generating technical debt.

Organizations must consider factors such as data size, replication locations, the importance of real-time transfers, and resource availability. 

Plan for the future

Organizations should ensure any data replication solution can handle the throughput of data transfer that they require.

This applies to current throughput requirements, and requirements in future as data volumes tend to grow as usage of the platform increases. 

A data replication solution that does not meet the demands in terms of throughput will lead to slow transfers, slow reporting, poor instance performance, and poor data availability.

Be conscious of internal resources

While many organizations choose to design and maintain a data replication solution in-house, custom or DIY approaches are difficult to implement and maintain, and the total cost of ownership tends to increase over time. 

Organizations that do not have adequate internal resources such as a robust development team will struggle to maintain a custom-built data replication solution and should consider working with managed service providers.

Consider data security requirements 

To fortify the security and privacy of business-sensitive data, ensure that the chosen ServiceNow data replication solution supports encryption. Encrypting data during the replication process safeguards against unauthorized access. Some organizations may also require obfuscation capabilities. 

It should also be noted that API enabled data replication exposes organization’s data to greater risk, as it requires external calls to be made to the platform in which data is being replicated from. Replication solutions that work natively, pushing data out mitigate this risk.

Assess the replication process and solution periodically 

It is essential to test the data replication process and solution to assess critical parameters such as:

• Performance – Measure the replication time, data volume, and network impact.
• Recovery – Evaluate the data recovery process’ capability in simulated failure scenarios.
• Restoration – Ensure data replication can successfully restore data from backups in disaster situations.
• Security – Mitigate the potential for breaches by ensuring users are following best practices for security such as never sharing login information.

Ongoing Supervision of the Data Replication Process

By monitoring the data replication process continuously, organizations can detect potential issues proactively and take the necessary measures. Data replication teams should evaluate and monitor the following parameters:

• Status – Regularly oversee data pipelines to ensure uninterrupted operations.
• Consistency – Verify data accuracy and integrity, guarding against losses, unexpected schema changes, table anomalies, or irregular data volumes.
• Latency – Track replication time to align with desired performance expectations.

For modern, data-driven organizations using ServiceNow, it is beneficial to use advanced data replication solutions that provide high-throughput, real-time data transfers; dashboard monitoring; encryption & obfuscation technology; vendor managed implementation and maintenance; and scalability. 

Fortunately, Servicenow is partnered with Perspectium who provide all the above via a ServiceNow-native, no-code solution that guarantees users complete control over their data whilst providing 24/7×365 support.

Replicating ServiceNow Data with Perspectium DataSync

Designed by ServiceNow’s founding developer, David Loo, Perspectium DataSync is a ServiceNow-native application and service for replicating ServiceNow data to a range of targets.

Unlike the Integration Hub and other typical integration approaches, Perspectium can transfer huge data volumes – over 1 billion per month – without impacting ServiceNow’s performance.

This is because unlike traditional approaches, Perspectium avoids making API calls to ServiceNow to transfer data. Instead, it works natively within ServiceNow and uses “Push” technology to transfer data in bulk, or dynamically.

Perspectium’s data replication and integration applications are delivered and managed as integrations-as-a-service. This means Perspectium’s integration experts handle everything from implementation to maintenance, with support available 24/7×365.

If you’d like to learn more about the following use case, check out the links below:

• Learn more: Perspectium for transferring and replicating ServiceNow data in bulk
  • Use cases: Reporting, Analysis, AI, BI, ML and more
• Learn more: Perspectium for dynamic data synchronization (eBonding) 
  • Use cases: Bidirectionally synchronize ServiceNow with ServiceNow, or ServiceNow with third-party applications

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