Hi Chuck,

I understand that we can not exclude foundation table like sys_user as hundreds of tables are referencing user table.

Prod data should exist only in prod environments because we typically don't apply the same rigour in access control and general security practices in dev and test environments as we do in prod. 

This is why we would like to avoid cloning production data.

The reason we are cloning the environment is to test the upgrade on our subprod instances before we upgrade prod. We have been advised that we need to test with prod data as well as configuration but we would prefer to only clone configuration / business rules (to protect the security of our prod data). Is it not possible to separate configuration of the ServiceNow instance from the data it holds?