Servers are down. Employees and customers can’t access critical applications. Even worse, no one knows which applications are impacted or who is affected by the issue, making it difficult to even troubleshoot. Chaos ensues, employee productivity comes to a complete halt, and customers are frustrated.
A major system outage like this, while unnerving for an IT professional, can be avoided with the help of a configuration management database, or CMDB. ServiceNow, a platform we support at Own, provides a robust CMDB that provides a single system of record and digital blueprint for IT infrastructure that helps thousands of businesses avoid outages, reduce the time it takes recover from incidents, maintain compliance and audit-readiness, and understand impact of changes to IT infrastructure before they are made.
What’s the impact of lost or corrupted CMDB data?
While the benefits of a CMDB are many, its value is contingent on having accurate and available data at all times. A CMDB can only be helpful if it contains high-quality, accurate, maintained information. When data in the CMDB (i.e. configuration items) is lost or corrupted, the risk of business disruption grows significantly, and the ability to diagnose outages, understand the impact of decisions and actions, manage assets, and maintain compliance are severely weakened. In fact, having inaccurate or incomplete CI data in the CMDB can cause even bigger problems if businesses aren’t careful.
Having a CMDB that contains “dirty” data can create confusion, waste effort, and lose time when a major incident occurs. Further complicating the issue is that CI data can sometimes be lost or corrupted days or even weeks before anyone even notices. Over that period of time, business decisions and changes to IT environments may only add to the mess, especially if IT teams are unable to examine historical data to trace all of the changes and identify how and when their data loss or corruption occurred.
This is a nightmare scenario that keeps IT leaders and ServiceNow platform owners up at night.
Below is a quote from a ServiceNow customer in the manufacturing industry whose CMDB was corrupted by a development partner. It took this customer over a week to recover, which led to further data loss and affected their ability to view how service incidents impacted their business.
“Two months ago a development partner corrupted data in our CMDB. ServiceNow gave us a temporary instance while they looked into this. It took two days for ServiceNow to provide us backup data and over a week before we felt recovered. During this process we had further data loss. We also couldn’t assign CI’s to service incidents which impacted our visibility into how they were impacting infrastructure and business as a whole”
- ServiceNow Platform Owner, Electronics Manufacturer
You can see now why an accurate CMDB is so important to an IT organization and why it’s a high priority to protect the data in the CMDB.
But how do you do it?
Protect CMDB data (and other ServiceNow data) with Own
Protecting your ServiceNow platform data is essential to avoiding business disruption and minimizing risk, whether it’s related to IT incidents, employee requests, customer cases, or configuration items in your CMDB. However, did you know it’s your responsibility (as a customer) to protect your ServiceNow data?
Recover for ServiceNow helps companies increase CMDB data resilience and accuracy with automated backups and rapid, stress-free recovery. With Recover for ServiceNow, companies like Midland Credit Management can back up their critical CMDB data with more control, restore lost or corrupted data with speed and ease, and mitigate risk with flexible backup retention policies.
To learn more about Own Recover for ServiceNow, check out our ebook, "The Complete Guide to Backup and Recovery for ServiceNow.”
