Best Practices for Externalizing Attachments in ServiceNow?

[GustavoBaez]

We’re exploring an architectural change in our ServiceNow instance and would appreciate feedback or insights from others who may have implemented something similar.

Our institution is considering not storing attachments within ServiceNow, and instead integrating with an external storage solution via REST.

A few key questions we’re trying to answer:

• What are the recommended best practices for handling attachments externally?
• Has anyone successfully disabled or restricted native attachment storage across the instance? If so, how?
• What patterns have you used for replacing the native attachment experience (e.g., custom UI actions, widgets, or integrations)?
• Are there any major pitfalls or limitations we should be aware of (performance, security, compliance, etc.)?

At a high level, we’re considering disabling attachments and implementing a custom UI mechanism to upload files to an external system via REST.

Any guidance, lessons learned, or references would be greatly appreciated.

[Seema Hegde]

Is this requirement for a specific application, or the platform as a whole? What is the real business requirement or need?

I would not recommend unilaterally disabling attachments. That can be a pitfall and a potential show-stopper for a lot of processes. Simplest of questions to consider:

- How will you handle any incoming emails with attachments? 

- What if you need an employee to provide an attachment or a doc in a service request?

- What if you need to have a process requiring employee signatures on documents? Auto-generate documents?

- Load a small subset of data that's easier using excel vs manual input or an integration?

You really need to think through your use cases here. And even then I wouldn't disable attachments as it could affect system functions. 

What is driving this requirement?

[GustavoBaez]

Due to PII and other sensitive data the institution works with we've been asked to not store any attachments within our instance at any point. That's part of the research I'm doing here is figuring out what other's might've done with similar asks and what we need to consider. We do have a central system that handles these documents and we would be looking to integrate with them. However within the platform we'd need to disable the OOB Attachment functionality and build our own.