User-inflicted data loss and corruption are all-to-common in cloud applications like ServiceNow. Typically, these incidents occur due to human error, erroneous integrations, upgrades, bad code, and even malicious intent. While ServiceNow is responsible for the availability and uptime of their platform, your organization is ultimately the steward of the data stored in cloud applications. Therefore, it’s your responsibility to ensure that the data you need can be recovered quickly when accidental loss or corruption occurs.
ServiceNow does have some out-of-the-box, native backup capabilities, but their limitations could prevent you from addressing key requirements of a backup and recovery strategy. Let’s look at a few of these related specifically to backups, and why it makes sense to extend the native backup capabilities.
ServiceNow's backup limitations
NOTE: While ServiceNow's native solution does have limitations when it comes to its recovery capabilities, this post examines ServiceNow's backup capabilities specifically.
No backup retention beyond 14 days
With ServiceNow, you can retain monthly backups of your production instance for up to 14 days, and daily backups for seven days, periods which you cannot extend. This is problematic if you’re counting on your backups to meet data retention requirements for regulatory purposes, where mandated periods are usually measured in years.
No on-demand backups
Full backups are performed every seven days (weekly) and differential backups are taken every 24 hours (daily), however the exact timing of these backups is not guaranteed. The system finds the best time for backups within a 24-hour period and customers cannot modify that time. This limitation undercuts one of the primary use cases of a backup and recovery strategy, which is to provide a safety net during planned changes to an instance.
A more comprehensive solution: Own Recover for ServiceNow
Own Recover for ServiceNow improves data resilience and compliance by equipping organizations with better control over backup timing and retention, proactive notification of unusual data loss or corruption, and the ability to quickly restore data - from entire instances down to individual records - in a self-service fashion.
In this post, we explain how Own Recover can help you restore your ServiceNow data with greater ease. But first, here are several advantages of Own’s solution, specifically related to our backup capabilities:
Gain peace of mind during changes to your instances
With Recover, you can run on-demand backups before and after significant changes to your instances such as upgrades, migrations, new customizations and integrations. You can also compare pre and post-change backups to verify there’s no unexpected data loss or corruption, and rollback changes as needed.
Ensure regulatory compliance
We allow you to tailor retention policies for every instance to keep copies for exactly the right time period. Retain daily backups for up to 10 years and monthly backups for up to 99 years.
Stay audit-ready with searchable archives of historical data
Own also makes it easy to quickly understand what your data looked like historically. Within the application, you can answer questions about past history using keyword searches across backups, files and attachments, as well as zero in on precise data by focusing searches on specific items.
Leverage backup data to feed analytics
With Recover, you can get even more value from your backups. You have the ability to export historical backup data to feed analytic data stores, and even schedule daily exports to automatically keep that data up-to-date.
To learn more about Recover for ServiceNow, check out our ebook, "The Complete Guide to Backup and Recovery for ServiceNow".
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