Whether for compliance, legal, security, or other reasons, much of the data you store in ServiceNow needs to be available weeks, months—even years—after it’s been created. Whatever your situation is, backups provide peace of mind and an easy way to retain and access historical data for extended periods of time.
Recently, ServiceNow informed their customers that they will be changing their default backup retention policy. Currently, ServiceNow retains 4 weekly full backups (28 days), plus a rolling 6 days of differential backups. However, as of May 8th, ServiceNow will retain only 2 weekly full backups (14 days), plus a rolling 6 days of differential backups.
Why is this significant, and what does it mean for you?
If you’re counting on your backups to meet data retention requirements for regulatory purposes or internal policies, mandated periods are usually measured in years, not days. With an even shorter retention period, when you experience a significant data loss or corruption that isn’t discovered immediately, the chances are even greater that you won’t be able to turn to a backup of your data. Moreover, as we’ve written about previously in this blog, ServiceNow advises against restoring a production instance from their backups and only doing so as a last resort.
If you don’t feel confident that you can meet your data compliance requirements like Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), HIPAA, or FINRA SEC 17a-4 with ServiceNow’s backup retention policies, consider a different approach, like Own. We allow you to tailor retention policies for every instance to keep immutable copies for exactly the right time period. With Own Recover for ServiceNow, you can retain on-demand and daily backups for up to 10 years and monthly backups for as long as you need them.
You can also use Own’s intuitive search capabilities to find specific types of data throughout your history of backups. Whether you need to keep data for three months, three years, or three decades, Own gives you the flexibility to implement a customized retention schedule.
To learn more about your backup and recovery options for ServiceNow, check out our website or download our ebook, "The Complete Guide to Backup and Recovery for ServiceNow".
