What Is Data Archiving?: A Guide for ServiceNow Users

Data archiving is a core practice in enterprise data management. It involves identifying data that is not in active use and transferring it into repositories for long-term storage. 

Data archiving also serves organizations’ efforts to achieve and maintain compliance with data regulations. 

As the value of data to business has increased, data archives have become reservoirs of knowledge and insight.

Archiving in ServiceNow

ServiceNow provides an archiving feature, although some organizations may find its capabilities limiting.

It’s capabilities include:

• Rules-based archiving allowing archive and destroy events to be triggered when certain conditions – such as the date of creation – are met. 
• Archive management capabilties such as changing the archive schedule, and viewing & restoring archived records

Often, archiving is undertaken to relieve storage constraints in actively used systems and solutions. 

However, in ServiceNow, users archive inactive data from primary tables to a set of archive tables to manage table size growth. 

Since ServiceNow’s archive tables reside within the user’s ServiceNow platform, this example of archiving does not help relieve storage constraints.

The archive tables also have limitations in terms of table size:

Table Attribute	Size
Single table static size limit	65535 bytes
Row size limit	8126 bytes
Columns	1000 for Oracle 1011 for others

Why is Data Archiving Essential for ServiceNow Users?

The longer a ServiceNow instance runs, the more likely it will accumulate data. This data can often become obsolete and/or stale. It may also have value, or regulatory mandates for retention, but not required for the day-to-day operations of the organization. 

For example, task records from two years ago may not hold much relevance to the organization today, and so can be considered “stale”. 

Retaining too much stale and obsolete data can cause performance degradation by unnecessarily consuming system resources when querying the database. 

This means efforts to retrieve data for use cases such as reporting, analytics, business intelligence (BI) and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) initiatives are adversely affected. 

What Is a “Good” Archive Strategy for ServiceNow Users?

A well-executed data archiving strategy optimizes resource performance in active systems for quick and cost-effective data retrieval while offering a structured approach to data transfer in compliance with regulations and laws. 

The following capabilities highlight the core functions of a good data archiving strategy:

• Data discovery – Data archiving enables both admins and end-users to find business-critical records (such as spreadsheets, PPTs, etc.) quickly, and enhance self-access and data democratization. 
• Data management – Data archiving solutions improve data management by removing obsolete or dated records from the platform. This keeps the data growth in check, facilitating quick access to active, business-critical data.
• Data availability and visibility – Well-built data archiving solutions analyze, classify, and index records when moving it from in-use platforms. Thanks to proper classification and indexing, it’s easier for users to search for relevant information in archived data to gain insights.
• Data compliance – Data archiving best practices ensure an organization adheres to the relevant compliance regulations and laws. Many modern archiving solutions can automatically prepare compliance audits and respond to business queries.

Why Organizations Should Consider Archiving ServiceNow Data Off-platform

A recurring issue facing ServiceNow users, is the difficulty in getting data out of the platform. 

This applies to archiving, and various other use cases including transferring data into third-party, purpose-built solutions for analysis, BI, AI, ML and more.

With ServiceNow’s default archiving feature, users are limited to archiving ServiceNow data within “archive tables” that exist within the user’s ServiceNow instance. 

This prevents users from using archive data in analysis, BI, AI, ML and other solutions. 

It also prevents users from reducing the amount of data stored within ServiceNow, leaving organizations at risk of incurring additional storage fees. 

Archiving off-platform addresses these two common issues, by allowing users to archive data within repositories where storage is cheaper – local or cloud-based – and allow that data to be easily retrieved and fed into complementary solutions as and when required.

Archive ServiceNow Data Off-platform with Perspectium

While ServiceNow’s default archiving feature does not allow organizations to archive data off-platform, users are able to upgrade ServiceNow via a native-application and enable this feature. 

The native-application in question is Data Archive for ServiceNow, from ServiceNow partners, Perspectium. 

Data Archive for ServiceNow extends the following benefits to ServiceNow users: 

• Archive ServiceNow data off-platform – avoid incurring additional storage fees and improve ServiceNow instance performance
• Maintain total control while archiving data through condition-based filtering
• Archive data securely with encryption, protecting data at-rest and in-transit
• Support and improve data compliance

Perspectium’s services and ServiceNow-native applications were created by David Loo – the founding developer of ServiceNow. 

Perspectium’s archiving solution – as well as Perspectium’s other data integration and management applications – was specifically architected to avoid impacting ServiceNow’s performance. 

Thanks to this, archiving and retrieval with Perspectium is fast, and supports massive throughput. 

Archiving and transferring data with Perspectium solutions is secure, with data encrypted both at-rest and in-transit, providing organizations with confidence that their data is safe. 

To start archiving off-platform with Perspectium, contact us to arrange a demo.