4 ways ServiceNow, Google offer seamless multicloud workflows

Siddhartha Agarwal, managing director, SaaS partnerships and co-innovation, Google Cloud at Google, co-authored this blog.

When organizations embrace cloud as a core component of their IT operations, they have options: a wholesale migration to the public cloud, incremental or large-scale hybrid deployments, private clouds, or even running services across multiple clouds.

More than 90% of enterprises have a multicloud strategy. However, the majority also face higher than planned cloud costs and a need to optimize their existing cloud resources. These organizations have a few core requirements in common:

• IT teams must maintain visibility into and control over critical applications and data, regardless of where their workloads reside.
  
• Cloud migrations need to be carefully planned and quickly executed.
  
• Downtime is not an option.
  
• IT teams need to proactively avoid outages.
  

To help organizations accelerate their cloud migrations securely and efficiently, ServiceNow is expanding our partnership with Google Cloud in four key ways.

1. Enabling real-time visibility

Typically, large organizations have applications and data spanning multiple locations: private clouds running on premises, one or multiple public clouds, or hybrid environments. Managing these disparate workloads and data can be challenging—teams need to know where workloads are and how they’re connected to help ensure they can be properly managed.

ServiceNow and Google Cloud are integrating Google Cloud Asset Inventory tools with ServiceNow® IT Operations Management (ITOM) Visibility services. This will deliver real-time views of data and help improve data quality in an organization’s configuration management database (CMDB) through automated updates and reduced operational overhead.

Ultimately, this means IT teams will have better visibility into, and management of, workloads across their entire IT estate. As a result, they’ll be better positioned to leverage their existing governance and compliance models across cloud, hybrid, and on-prem deployments to optimize IT operations and reduce risk.

Travel technology company Sabre has been a longtime user of ServiceNow ITOM. The company has superior uptime requirements that demand strict governance to ensure successful ongoing operations. Last year, Sabre announced a large-scale partnership with Google to migrate its platform onto Google Cloud.

“We need assets deployed on Google Cloud to be reflected in our ServiceNow CMDB, be able to leverage our existing IT workflows to provision assets on Google Cloud, and accelerate migration of our on-premises workloads onto Google Cloud,” explains Charles Cinert, Sabre’s VP of global operations. “We are thrilled to see the partnership investing in these areas to provide us unified visibility, governance, and controls across on-premises and Google Cloud.”

2. Accelerating cloud migrations

Once a baseline management framework is established, IT teams can turn their focus to evaluating and migrating workloads. For organizations with a complex IT landscape, this can be particularly challenging, as it can take a long time to identify which workloads to migrate, how applications should be migrated (lift-and-shift, refactored, or retired), and in what order to move them. On top of that, on-prem workloads need to be optimized for cloud deployments.

ServiceNow CMDB provides a single system of record for your IT infrastructure and digital service data. It’s able to assess everything you have and help you migrate it in the best way for your organization. Now integrated with Google Cloud Rapid Assessment and Migration Program (RAMP), CMDB enables real-time insights into Google Cloud performance and workload sizing.

In addition, ServiceNow and Google are exploring advanced self-service access to provisioning through services such as Google Private Catalog Service and the ServiceNow Service Catalog. Our vision is to increase agility in the IT organization while maintaining governance and control.

“Sabre realizes value as each workload lands in Google Cloud, and our migration spans thousands of workloads over the next 10 years,” Cinert says. “This partnership represents a way for us to accelerate that effort while reducing the risk associated with it.”

3. Providing consistent governance

When moving mission-critical workloads such as SAP systems to the cloud, helping ensure operational excellence is paramount. To support the highest levels of uptime, security, and control over data, we’re expanding our catalog of integration “spokes” available in IntegrationHub to include more Google Cloud and Google Workspace services.

This increased access will enable organizations to manage their Google Cloud assets from ServiceNow—and facilitate governance and security around their cloud assets, aligned with existing IT workflows. This is particularly important as organizations create high-availability and disaster recovery environments for their critical applications.

4. Predicting issues and automating resolutions

IT organizations work tirelessly to minimize the impacts of service outages. ServiceNow AIOps leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to sift through large sets of data to help organizations predict outages and automate resolutions.

Through this partnership, ServiceNow AIOps can now consume and process IT event data from Google Cloud Operations (formerly Stackdriver events) to identify trends and correlate data that may affect service levels.

For example, ServiceNow ITOM Health can ingest Google Cloud event data—along with telemetry from logs, monitoring tools, and other data sources—to quickly identify root causes of issues and automate remediation of affected systems.

We’re excited about this next phase in our alliance with Google. We aim to deliver significant value to customers with refined focus on improving their visibility into the entire IT estate, accelerating cloud migrations, and bringing a new level of governance and AI-based operations to Google Cloud.

Learn more about the benefits of the ServiceNow-Google partnership.

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