What Causes Data Loss in ServiceNow?

ITSM plays a significant role in many organization’s operations and so data loss in ServiceNow and other ITSM solutions can be devastating. 

A solid understanding of what causes data loss in ServiceNow can help organizations implement preventative measures.

Table of contents:

1. Data Loss Statistics and Trends
2. The Causes of Data Loss in ServiceNow
3. Recovering From Data Loss in ServiceNow
4. Conclusion

Data Loss Statistics and Trends

Data loss is a prevalent issue for organizations across industries.

• In 2023 alone, four out of five organizations (85%) suffered from data loss incidents, citing “careless users” as the number one reason. 
• According to a 2022 survey, 76% of respondents lost critical data within their organization, and 45% encountered permanent data loss.
• As cyber criminals increasingly shift their focus to cloud services, there’s a substantial increase in cloud exploitation.

These statistics speak volumes about the negative consequences of data loss. Besides putting sensitive information at stake, data loss incidents lead to a breach of customer trust and a loss of market reputation.

The Causes of Data Loss in ServiceNow

Data loss is an inevitable consequence of the way we store information. Software, computers and storage devices are complex systems with which a lot could go wrong. 

Understanding the following common causes of data loss in ServiceNow can help you mitigate the disruption:

Human error

Human error is a leading cause of data loss. Employees and/or system users can often accidentally delete, overwrite, or modify data due to negligence, insufficient training, or unintentional actions. 

Malware and viruses

Malware and viruses are malicious software programs designed to infiltrate and disrupt systems. They can corrupt, damage, delete or even steal business-critical data, severely disrupting business operations in the process.

System failure

System failures – such as a crash or a time out during a data transfer – can cause data loss and corruption. This sort of data loss event may occur due to the misconfiguration of an integration solution leading to incorrect data mappings, or data being corrupted when transferred to an incompatible system.

• Related blog: No More Data Loss with Your Integrations

Other causes of data loss

As a service designed primarily for the cloud, ServiceNow stores user data on behalf of their customers. This means users have no control over the hardware and infrastructure storing their ServiceNow data and protecting it against loss. 

However, some organizations decide to extract and store their ServiceNow data locally and so an understanding of hardware-related data loss is beneficial to those users.

Additionally, ServiceNow is also vulnerable to hardware-related data loss, and so an awareness of the threats they face can help organizations decide whether local backups are necessary.

Data loss events that may affect ServiceNow as an organization and/or users who store ServiceNow data in local environments include:

Power outages 

Sudden power outages can abruptly shut down software systems, resulting in the loss of unsaved data and corruption of existing files. Frequent power outages can also shorten the lifespan of hard drives, increasing the risk of crashes. 

Physical damage and natural disasters

A whole host of threats including natural disasters (fires, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, etc.) can cause severe physical damage to hardware infrastructure, servers, and data storage devices, leading to data loss. 

Accidental formatting without data backup

Accidental formatting of storage devices without proper backups can lead to complete data loss. Hard drives can be mistakenly formatted during system updates and/or when users misinterpret system prompts or error messages.

Recovering From Data Loss in ServiceNow

Understanding the causes of data loss in ServiceNow can help organizations mitigate the opportunity for data loss events – with “mitigate” being the operative word here.

With so many variables, even the best prepared organizations cannot avoid data loss events entirely and so a plan to recover from data loss in ServiceNow is essential.

Despite this, and even with the widespread increase in data loss incidents, only 54% of organizations have a dedicated company-wide data recovery plan. 

Limitations of ServiceNow’s backup and restore capabilities

Those without a data recovery plan are de facto reliant on the in-built – and significantly limited – backup and restore capabilities provided by ServiceNow. Limitations include:

No control over when backups occur including schedule and frequency

Since backup schedules are managed entirely by ServiceNow, end-users have no control over when backups occur. This also means users cannot decide to create a backup on-demand.

Short backup retention period (up to 14 days only)

As per ServiceNow’s policy, the platform retains backups for up to 14 days. This means any data loss that happened outside of that window cannot be recovered by ServiceNow. Since data loss isn’t always noticed as and when it occurs, this 14 day limit can be particularly problematic.

Initiating restores is a time consuming process involving ServiceNow Support

Recovering data via ServiceNow’s default capabilities involves submitting a ticket to their support team and some coordination between both parties. The whole process can take several days, depending on the environment’s size and the restoration’s complexity.

No option to granularly control what is restored

ServiceNow’s restore processes are designed to replace entire databases rather than individual data elements.

Restoration requires instance downtime

During a ServiceNow-led restore, access to the production instance is limited, with the instance being taken offline for a time during the restoration process.

How to Take Control of ServiceNow Backup and Restore

Many of the limitations to ServiceNow’s default backup and restore capabilities add significantly to the disruption of data loss events.

Fortunately, organizations can take control of the ServiceNow backup and restore process and avoid such limitations via the ServiceNow-native application, DataSync Snapshot.

The Perspectium made application works like a time machine for ServiceNow and lets users control:

• When and how often backups occur (including on-demand backups)
• Whether to create a full backup, or backup select data only
• How long backups are retained for
• When recoveries are initiated
• Whether to recover in full, or restore select data only

Additionally, the Snapshot restoration process requires zero instance downtime, allowing organizations to recover from data loss events with minimal disruption.

Both the backup and recover process is fast, helped by Perspectium’s data replication technology, purpose-built for ServiceNow.

Are you curious to learn more about Perspectium’s data recovery solutions for ServiceNow? Talk to us!