When to use Domain Separation?

persahlstrom · ‎12-23-2015

Hello,

I understand that Domain Separation is a way do divide one instance to "multiple instances", is that correct? I'm also wondering in what kind of situation you might have to do it? In my company we are currently having a IT-support group which are the only business entity that use Servicenow as a way of handling incomming cases. Now, we want another business enity within our company to be able to use Servicenow, but not in the same way as our IT-support group. Might this be a typical situation to use domain separation or could there be another solution? I'm pretty new to Servicenow and it's amazing features so please be gentle and bare with me

Best regards,

Per

Uncle Rob · ‎12-23-2015

Per,

Here's the straight answer. The use case you describe is probably the worst justification for domain separation possible. Further, it undermines one of the most important advantages of ServiceNow (acting as a single source of engagement for service consumption). Not meaning this as a slight against inexperience, just wanting to give you a super clear answer.

Consider the following:

- How does separating the domain help you customers engage the services within the company? (hint: it doesn't)

- Why 2x the labor required to manage what could be a single deployment?

- Domain separation is irreversible. If you find out a year from now it was the wrong solution to the problem, then it sucks to be you.

- Most existing and emerging services are not naturally silo'd. Take onboarding for example. List out all the players involved in employee acquisition and you have recruiting, benefits processing, legal, training, facilities, security, and IT too if you're into that kind of thing. The service owners who call for their own privately managed instance of SN (usually via domain sep) seldom have to tell the stakeholders "Hey, if you want to hire someone, please enter a request into these 8 different systems".

The whole point of ServiceNow is to put as many business services as possible into one instance, to reap the benefits of multi-participant workflow, task relationships, unified consumption platform, and collapsed development/support resources.

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syedfarhan · ‎12-23-2015

Hi Per,

Well..Domain separation is a way to separate data into (and optionally to separate administration by) logically-defined domains. For example A client XYZ have two business and they are using servicenow single instance for both business.They do not want that user's from one business can see data of other business.Here we can configure domain separation to isolate the records from both business.

Pls read Domain Separation - ServiceNow Wiki for more updates.

Thanks,

Mark correct if it is useful

patrickd2 · ‎12-23-2015

Hi Per,

I am happy you are finding that ServiceNow is an incredible platform. Domain Separation AKA Multi Tenancy allows you to have data from two different organizations where they CANNOT see the data for some legal or otherwise mandatory reason.

MSPs use Domain Separation to host multiple companies on the same instance. Very large companies that have same hard requirements of data sensitivity between organizations will use it as well. I would suggest only using it if there are those hard requirements to not share data. Otherwise you are better to just create an app and set the appropriate roles to read and write the records.

Hope this helps.

persahlstrom · ‎12-23-2015

Hi Patrick,

thanks for a fast reply. The problem I could think of are distinguishing the specified Email-adresses between organization A and organization B in just one domain. Or am i wrong? For example, in my situation the IT-support group needs to have an email handling incomming cases, while the other group need to have one email handling their data. As far as I currently know, one domain can only support one specified email? I dont know how to really explain it since this project is still in a phase were we are gathering requirements of their needs.

Best regards,

Per

patrickd2 · ‎12-23-2015

Hi Per,

ServiceNow can handle lots of email domains and you can build rules to route accordingly. Domain Separation literally is just segmenting data on tables. However I would not use it (if that is the only reason) to separate business rules, workflow and UI definition since not all applications from ServiceNow or other companies on the Store are compatible with Domain Separation. Every application you build on ServiceNow will have to be built to be compatible with Domain Separation. We have an initiative to work with the Store vendors on helping them to make their applications compatible and what the benefits are to do so.