The ServiceNow Data Archiving Plug-in and its Limitations

The ServiceNow Data Archiving plug-in has a number of limitations that lead organizations into implementing an alternative archiving solution.

An understanding of such limitations can help organizations decide between ServiceNow’s in-built data archiving capabilities and purpose-built archiving solutions.

Table of contents:

1. What is the ServiceNow Data Archiving Plug-in?
2. ServiceNow Data Archiving: What the Platform Can Do?
3. ServiceNow Data Archiving: What the Platform Can’t Do
4. Why Organizations Need More Robust Archival Capabilities for ServiceNow
5. How to Get Around the ServiceNow Data Archiving Limitations

What is the ServiceNow Data Archiving Plug-in?

ServiceNow provides archiving capabilities via its Data Archiving plug-in.

The Data Archiving plug-in is a collection of features available to ServiceNow users out-of-the-box, permitting them to move data from primary tables, and into archive tables. 

ServiceNow Data Archiving: What the Platform Can Do

The ServiceNow Data Archiving plug-in provides the following:

Rules-based archive and destroy events

Automate the archiving process by initiating archive and destroy events when specific conditions are met, such as the record’s creation date. 

Archive management

Users can adjust archive schedules, view archived records, and restore them as required.

Domain separation

Incidents and records tied to a specific domain keep their domain designation, ensuring data integrity and compliance across separate domains.

Reference record handling

When a table is archived, all related reference records are moved to corresponding archive tables, keeping the data intact.

ServiceNow Data Archiving: What the Platform Can’t Do

While ServiceNow provides the above archiving capabilities, many users find that the solution does not meet their requirements. And one of the main reasons for this is the way the platform archives data.

The organization generally does not make it easy for its users to extract data out of ServiceNow and its archiving feature is no exception. 

When the ServiceNow platform archives data, it simply moves data from production tables, to archive tables. Both table types and the data they store are still “on-platform”, and all of that data consumes the organizations total allocated storage.

The ServiceNow Data Archiving limitations include:

Users cannot archive off-platform to save space and avoid storage fees

ServiceNow’s default archiving functionality moves inactive data from primary tables to archive tables that reside within the user’s ServiceNow environment. Thus, it does not help reduce the database footprint or alleviate storage use.

Users cannot archive off-platform to improve performance

Since the archived data remains within the Platform, organizations can accumulate significant volumes of inactive data over time. Archiving this data off-platform can free up additional resources. 

Users cannot create multiple archive events

Servicenow’s built-in archiving capabilities allow users to create only one archive rule per record – users cannot archive records multiple times.

Users without a ServiceNow license cannot retrieve archived data

As archived data is stored within the platform, a ServiceNow user license and the relevant access permissions are required to retrieve data. This may complicate requirements such as audits for organizations with a centralized compliance team.

Why Organizations Need More Robust Archiving Capabilities for ServiceNow

Organizations adversely affected by the ServiceNow Data Archiving limitations should consider implementing a purpose-built archiving solution.

As well as overcoming the aforementioned limitations, investing in an archiving solution is particularly important for the following reasons:

Platforms generating and storing increasing amounts of data

Owing to data-driven business operations across industries, today, we’re witnessing an extraordinary surge in data growth. While the total volume of data generated, stored, and consumed globally was 64.2 zettabytes in 2020, this figure is expected to exceed 180 zettabytes by 2025.

Storing continuously growing amounts of data within an organization’s internal systems puts a strain on memory and resources, leading to performance bottlenecks. 

Over time, organizations incur a significant technical debt as overloaded systems struggle to meet increasing demands and development time is consumed by dealing with the issues.

Increasing risks of data loss and corruption

As data volumes scale, the risk of data loss and corruption grows. Archiving mitigates this risk by securely moving inactive data into long-term storage, safeguarding it from accidental deletion or corruption in frequently accessed systems. 

Archiving essentially creates secure data repositories for vital business data, ensuring it remains safe and accessible for future usage. 

Additionally, by reducing the volume of active data on-platform, archiving helps streamline upgrades and migrations, effectively minimizing downtime and data loss risks during these processes.

Strict compliance and data retention requirements

As data regulations such as GDPR and HIPAA become more commonplace, organizations must have processes and systems in place to support regulatory compliance. 

Archiving plays a vital role in supporting an organization’s regulatory compliance. Not only by safeguarding regulated data from accidental deletion/loss, but by making the audit process more straightforward by making the retrieval of archived data easier.

How to Get Around the ServiceNow Data Archiving Limitations

Organizations that want to overcome the limitations of ServiceNow’s out-of-the-box archiving plug-in, can install Data Archive for ServiceNow.

The ServiceNow-native application allows users to archive ServiceNow data externally, within their preferred data repositories, enabling them to:

• Avoid ServiceNow’s additional storage fees and improve instance performance by moving data to cost-efficient external repositories.
• Use condition-based filtering to customize archive events.
• Protect data during archive events with encryption.
• Strengthen data compliance efforts by archiving regulated data within systems where enterprise-wide access can be securely governed. 
• And more.

Click here to learn more about Data Archive for ServiceNow.