Pairing best-of-breed datacenters and digital workflows to modernize IT

Since its founding 20 years ago, CyrusOne has grown to be the third largest datacenter provider in the US, serving more than 200 Fortune 1000 customers worldwide. We haven’t reached this level of success by resting—we’re always on the lookout for better ways to serve our customers and new technologies to stay ahead of the game.

That’s why one of our recent initiatives was IT automation. We knew that as we continued to grow, manual processes around change management, operations, and reporting might begin to slow us down. So, this was the perfect chance to further modernize IT in preparation for the future.

Our plan of attack was to move to a new platform. But given the scale of the project, we didn’t want to act until we were 100% certain we’d found the right technology and vendor. It wasn’t long before our perseverance was rewarded.

An evolving relationship

ServiceNow approached us in 2018 for a colocation solution for two new production environments on the east and west coasts.

According to Keith Martin, senior director for cloud capacity engineering at ServiceNow, “CyrusOne stood out from the pack. Not only did it offer outstanding prowess as a datacenter operator, but it was also refreshingly transparent in its communication. And it didn’t try to force us into a box—CyrusOne worked with us to build and orient racks the way we wanted to.”

After working with ServiceNow and learning about its products, we realized the Now Platform® was the ideal solution to replace our existing system. ServiceNow is the only vendor on the market that offers all the tools we need to run our operations under a single umbrella, and I think it’s the best overall platform available.

Rather than just becoming customers of one another, both our teams saw the opportunity to build a strategic partnership. At CyrusOne, we love to invest in our customers. The prospect of working with ServiceNow—leveraging best-of-breed technology alongside best-of-breed infrastructure for mutual benefit—was precisely the kind of justification we needed to secure internal buy-in for the Now Platform.

Best of all, we found there’s a lot of overlap between the CyrusOne and ServiceNow customer bases. By partnering, we’ve unlocked entirely new avenues to serve our shared users.

Best-of-breed on both sides

We’re still in the early stages of our ServiceNow adoption, but we’ve already implemented several tools to help us transform operational efficiency.

For example, change management used to be a complex process that spanned multiple systems and required manual approvals. With ServiceNow® IT Service Management (ITSM), we’ve been able to centralize change management activities onto a single, intuitive system with automated approval mechanisms.

Similarly, we’re using ServiceNow Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) to introduce unprecedented levels of automation and efficiency around compliance management. And ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM) is helping us automate discovery of infrastructure, servers, and network topography.

This is only the beginning. Looking ahead, we plan to expand our use of the Now Platform—for instance, by leveraging ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM) to deliver an even better customer experience to our users.

We view ServiceNow as our platform of platforms. It’s going to be a huge part of our IT strategy and our overall business strategy in the next few years. In much the same way, I believe CyrusOne infrastructure will play a key role in ServiceNow’s own roadmap. With all the possibilities this partnership is driving, it’s a good time to be one of our mutual customers.

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