Pros and cons of domain separation

[Dinesh Kumar P2]

Hi All,

I'm new to ServiceNow and i want to know what are all the pros and cons of domain separation. I read Domain separation on wiki but i didn't get to know exact pros and cons of domain separation.

Please explain me some pros and cons

[Daniel Draes]

This is probably not that easy to explain quickly

Domain Separation is intended mainly for Service Providers. We use that for our MSP's that host more customers on one instance. Domain separation enables basically two things:

- Data Separation between Domains

- Process Separation between Domains

Data separation

Users are assigned a specific domain and can - by default - only see the data (tasks, CIs, ....) in the same domain.

Process separation

All configurations (Form Layouts, Business Rules, Workflows, ...) are domain aware. This means the same Business Rule can do completely different things based on the domain it is on. This allows that you can have different process definitions (e.g. state models, buttons,...) per domain.

While Data separation can also - and most of the times also easier - be achieved by leveraging ACLs (e.g. see ServiceNow Share), process separation is without domain separation more complex.

if you have some use cases in mind I am sure our MSP team is happy to discuss this in more detail to qualify if Domain separation is a good fit or not.

[JusCuz]

I've run into this a couple times with customers and really only can recommend even looking at Domain Separation if you are an MSP or are under a very strict regulatory requirement.

Once you implement domain separation there is no going back, you will have to live with it in your instance no matter what going forward.

That being said, there is an awesome thing on share put together by Ben Hollifield called Simple Record Separation that I've used for a customer recently. This works very well and was easy to make some changes to that we needed for our requirements. For this implementation we created a new field that we based the separation on, and placed users into buckets based on that field. (this is what required the modification to what was on Share). If you are looking at a need for limiting visibility of documents for any reason, I recommend installing this into a DEV instance and giving it a try first.

ServiceNow Share