A publicly traded communications company capitalizes on its ServiceNow investment with Own

Situation

At this communications company, there are close to 500 ServiceNow Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) users. They are using the Service Portal for their entire 2,000- person employee base who interact with ServiceNow in some capacity daily.

The IT team uses ServiceNow’s Integrated Risk Management (IRM) to manage risk and compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) regulations. IRM is also used to ensure PCI DSS compliance and manage internal controls.

From the lifecycle of  idea generation to managing all of the internal IT or strategic business projects, ServiceNow is heavily integrated into the organization’s workflow.

The VP of IT is responsible for shared services, applications, internal and customer-facing digital needs, and operating companies or subsidiaries across all supported regions. 

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Key ServiceNow Applications important to their business include:

• IT Service Management (ITSM) to support all of their service management needs.
• IT Operations Management (ITOM) event management to manage the health of configuration items and CMDB and Discovery to manage thousands of endpoints within their IT landscape. 
• Integrated Risk Management (IRM) to manage risk and compliance across the business.
• Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) for project and portfolio management modules. 
• Telco Service Management for order management and support assistance of their telco inventory.

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Challenge

To protect mission-critical data,  the VP of IT relied on ServiceNow’s native backup capability. .

“That's all we were doing. And to be honest, I’m not even sure what that was” remarked the VIP of IT. 

When they purchased ServiceNow, they assumed that ServiceNow had built-in backup and recovery capabilities. If they needed to recover from a data loss, they could, right?

The VP of IT had to learn this pitfall the hard way. He recalled a particular incident where he needed to recover a very specific piece of data and he realized he couldn’t. 

This specific data set in their user table was overwritten when their production instance was cloned to a sub-prod instance. They knew the precise point in time that the overwrite happened and they needed to see what that table looked like a half hour earlier for comparison.

After hours of manually typing rules permissions and estimating loss times, the IT team was unable to revert the table back to its original state– before the data was lost. They quickly realized that if an incident like this happened again, they were in for another painful exercise of manually searching in ServiceNow. They were committed to finding a solution that maximized protection and efficiency. 

“ServiceNow requires you to essentially roll back the entire instance in order to go back to a certain point in time to relocate that data. That just wasn’t an option for us because it would mean loss of any new data that came in in the time after the overwrite. It was an impossible situation to get right.”

The VP of IT emphasized that this process also causes a distrust amongst business leaders. As one of the most pivotal and premium systems they own, the inability to fully recover from a data loss scenario could put management’s trust in teams in jeopardy. 

For a more comprehensive overview, they looked outside of this specific use case to understand what would happen to data lost across other ServiceNow systems. If data in their CMDB were to be corrupted, it would negatively impact business operations. ServiceNow is the only place where the interconnectivity between configuration items is maintained; it is a key element to their day-to-day operations.

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Why Own

The VP of IT was first introduced to Own when he and his team were looking for a backup and recovery solution for their Salesforce deployment. At that time, they discovered that a backup and recovery solution for ServiceNow was an option, too. 

He got a more comprehensive overview of Own at Knowledge 2022, ServiceNow’s annual user conference. He learned more about the company’s dedication to data backup and recovery, and its commitment as a ServiceNow Build partner.

Being able to rely on one data protection platform, like Own, to back up both of their critical SaaS systems, Salesforce and ServiceNow, meant they didn’t need to learn and master a new technology. Although the teams maintaining these systems are separate, the Own interface is intuitive enough for them to step in for one another should they need to.

It was also important to him to have a vendor that streamlined technology partner relations. 

“Just that level of consolidation was an important aspect for us. Looking for the best technology to support both platforms was a factor. Knowing how well Own worked for Salesforce was definitely a plus.”

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What it’s like working with Own as a vendor

Following Knowledge, the VP of IT met with the Own team for a series of configured demos. He was able to immediately jump into the company’s use cases for backup and restore, and delve into the technical details. With the data loss incident top of mind, the VP of IT wanted  to take a deeper dive into how the solution could help his team  recover in these types of situations. 

“During the POC, we found the answers we were looking for. I kept going back to our incident. We quickly saw that we had the ability to recover point in time data and the ability to look at the data of how it was yesterday which was simply priceless.”

For the company, one of the best things about Own is how it seamlessly runs in the background. This priceless peace of mind gives the IT team full confidence in this purchase decision. 

Own is more than just peace of mind for the VP of IT; it’s also a key component for cost savings on their cyber insurance policy. With insurance policies on both of their premium platforms that hold sales data, leads and orders, having Own means they pay less for those insurance policies, creating a win/win across the board.

With Own Recover, the team has the confidence to expand their ServiceNow footprint, which plays a critical role in helping move business objectives forward.   

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Results

Since implementing Own, the VP of IT and his team have experienced at least one other use case involving, once again, a situation where key data was overwritten by ServiceNow’s instance cloning process. 

This incident wrote over important development work as the team was preparing for a late Q1 access review. The ServiceNow admins were able to go into Own and restore the two tables of data that the IRM, the Integrated Risk Management module used by the Risk and Compliance team, had overwritten–with plenty of time to prepare for their Q1 access review. For the VP of IT, knowing that he had a reliable, efficient recovery solution in place changed the trajectory of this event. With Own, he and his team can trust that peace of mind will be a constant throughout the company’s  data protection journey.