ITSM Archiving and Why It’s So Necessary

ITSM archiving is integral to the effective management of data and its growth. 

The practice of ITSM – or IT Service Management – exists at an intersection which most other areas of an organization, its customers/users and its partners pass through.

As such, ITSM solutions generate a lot of data organizations wish to retain. Either because it is/could be useful, or because it is subject to regulatory compliance, or both. 

But holding on to too much data that is stored inefficiently can be costly, and make finding relevant information more difficult. 

This post details the importance of ITSM archiving and how the practice can be used to store historical and/or inactive data more efficiently.

Table of contents:

1. What is Archiving?
2. What is ITSM Archiving?
3. Why ITSM Archiving is Necessary
4. On-platform Archiving vs. Off-platform Archiving
5. Off-Platform Archiving for ServiceNow Users

What is Archiving?

Archiving describes the process of storing historical and/or inactive data separately to data that is currently in use. 

Typically, data is archived with long term retention in mind, but it may be retrieved per the organization’s needs. 

Organizations can store archived data in more cost and storage-efficient solutions (i.e. externally to the platforms that use the data), as high data availability is not as significant a factor. 

However, it is a best practice to ensure archive data can be located when required. For example, four auditing purposes or because an organization wants to utilize historical data for use cases including analysis, AI and more.

As such, organizations should be able to index archived data so that search capabilities can be used to locate and retrieve it when required.

What is ITSM Archiving?

ITSM archiving simply refers to archiving data related to ITSM. This can include incident data, attachments, comments, etc. 

ITSM solutions often come with in-built capabilities for ITSM archiving, and purpose-built ITSM archiving solutions are available from third-parties. In both cases, capabilities vary from vendor to vendor. 

For example, ServiceNow provides its own archiving capabilities. But various limitations such as the inability to archive data off-platform and reduce the total load on the database pose problems for some organizations.

• Related post: How to Archive Historical ServiceNow Data

Why ITSM Archiving is Necessary

ITSM solutions can generate massive amounts of data, with the amount of data generated scaling as the organization and its customer/user-base grows.

And while data-driven organizations can benefit greatly from having access to large amounts of data, some considerations must be made. 

Considerations including the relevance of data at present, the cost to store such data, and the impact data storage can have on a platform/solution’s performance. 

In ITSM solutions, unmanaged data growth can lead to a database becoming saturated, causing slow page/dashboard loading, slow queries, and other issues.

And because ITSM solution’s primary use isn’t data storage, the cost to store data on them is typically higher than it is for systems purpose-built for data storage.

Since not all data will be immediately relevant/required, paying a premium to keep it accessible within the ITSM solution makes little sense. 

Therefore, ITSM archiving provides organizations with a more cost effective means of storing inactive data, that can also improve the performance of the ITSM solution by reducing the strain excessive data volumes puts on the platform.

On-platform Archiving vs. Off-platform Archiving 

While there are a number of areas to evaluate a solution’s archiving capabilities, one of the most important distinctions to make is whether the solution archives on, or off-platform. 

On-platform archiving

Many SaaS-based solutions ship with archiving capabilities – including ITSM solutions – that support on-platform archiving only. This means while archived data is kept separately to active data, it is still stored within the same database.

For example, ServiceNow provides an archiving function that simply moves data from one place in the database (“active” tables), to another (archive tables).

While this allows active tables to be queried more efficiently, it has no impact on an organization’s ability to lower the cost of storing data on the platform.

Further, while active tables can be queried more efficiently, the overall performance of the platform is still impacted when it has to dedicate resources to store vast volumes of archived data.

Off-platform archiving 

In contrast, off-platform archiving allows organizations to transfer inactive data to an external repository, granting them the freedom to choose more cost-effective storage solutions for archiving.

Since the data is moved out of the platform of origin, it also improves performance by requiring fewer system resources to query and store data. 

Furthermore, organizations can store the data collected from multiple sources in a centralized repository and combine it with ServiceNow data.

They can then connect the repository with reporting, BI, AI & ML, and other solutions so it can be easily used in support of any future initiatives where the data is again relevant.

• Related post: ServiceNow Data Archiving Best Practices

Off-Platform Archiving for ServiceNow Users

With on-platform archiving as provided by ServiceNow, users are not offloading the burden of storing archived data from the platform. This leads to scaling data volumes and an increasing strain on the Platform’s resources and bandwidth, leading to performance issues. 

Scaling data volumes can also incur a significant cost, as ServiceNow charges its users for exceeding their contractual storage limit.

Fortunately, ServiceNow users can enable off-platform archiving via the ServiceNow-native application – Data Archive for ServiceNow.

Created by David Loo, ServiceNow’s founding developer, Perspectium is a data replication solution and service, purpose-built for ServiceNow. 

Data Archive for ServiceNow is one of a number of ServiceNow-native applications built by Perspectium to improve the experience of ServiceNow users.

In this case, Data Archive for ServiceNow enables off-platform archiving to external data repositories such as data lakes and warehouses. 

With Data Archive for ServiceNow, users can:

• Archive inactive/old ServiceNow data to a repository to improve ServiceNow instance performance and eliminate additional storage costs. 
• Create a schedule for periodic archival or archive on-demand as needed. 
• Support compliance requirements with secure, encrypted archiving and fast retrieval.
• Archive records multiple times, unlike ServiceNow’s default archiving capabilities.
• Make archived ServiceNow data easily available to solutions for analytics, reporting, AI, BI, and ML.

Are you eager to learn more about our Data Archive solution? Get the solution sheet or talk to us!