ServiceNow and other worldwide SaaS platforms have helped revolutionize how businesses run their operations. By automating mundane day-to-day tasks and allowing employees to more efficiently expand their workflows, ServiceNow has had a direct hand in the growth of business worldwide, especially big business. The bigger a business gets, however, the more challenges arise, especially when companies expand into new countries and markets.
While ServiceNow was helping to modernize the business landscape, the internet was quickly becoming more and more central to every part of our lives. As such, over the past decade or so, data has turned into perhaps the most valuable commodity in the world. With governments scrambling in recent years to put together data protection laws and regulations to properly protect their citizens’ personal data, global SaaS platforms like ServiceNow face a new challenge: compliance.
For as meaningful as SaaS technology is for some of the biggest companies in the world, the compliance burden imposed by local data protection laws and their requirements can prevent even the most developed business from expanding to new markets that have stringent data regulations. While ServiceNow and others have introduced data protection mechanisms to keep the data in their clouds safe, it isn’t enough to satisfy the demands of data governance, which governments are increasingly likely to actively oversee.
The Basis of the Problem
ServiceNow has adapted to plenty of challenges before, including a constantly evolving IT service management system. The system leverages customer experience from the first point of contact and the provision of customer helpdesk services to implement comprehensive solutions for governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) management.
With the latest technology stack automating, predicting, digitalizing, and optimizing company processes and tasks, international companies have flocked to ServiceNow to give their own customers a top-notch experience. ServiceNow’s complex stack actually works against it in the context of data regulations though, as countries with strict data protection laws often require data localization, meaning that sensitive data cannot leave the country of origin. This requires a unique stack setup in each of those countries, which is why international companies are the primary victims of data governance legislation.
Compliance issues in ServiceNow
This problem doesn’t just affect ServiceNow, as any SaaS platform working in the cloud deals with these types of challenges, defining a cloud provider’s architecture and approach to data handling. Companies previously only had to truly worry about protecting sensitive information stored in their systems, but new legislation has vastly expanded the scope of data governance.
This crackdown on how companies use customer data is not even a direct result of governing principles, but rather the increase in public awareness of how people's personal data was being managed and sold by companies like Facebook and Google.
While ServiceNow was helping to modernize the business landscape, the internet was quickly becoming more and more central to every part of our lives. As such, over the past decade or so, data has turned into perhaps the most valuable commodity in the world. With governments scrambling in recent years to put together data protection laws and regulations to properly protect their citizens’ personal data, global SaaS platforms like ServiceNow face a new challenge: compliance.
For as meaningful as SaaS technology is for some of the biggest companies in the world, the compliance burden imposed by local data protection laws and their requirements can prevent even the most developed business from expanding to new markets that have stringent data regulations. While ServiceNow and others have introduced data protection mechanisms to keep the data in their clouds safe, it isn’t enough to satisfy the demands of data governance, which governments are increasingly likely to actively oversee.
The Basis of the Problem
ServiceNow has adapted to plenty of challenges before, including a constantly evolving IT service management system. The system leverages customer experience from the first point of contact and the provision of customer helpdesk services to implement comprehensive solutions for governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) management.
With the latest technology stack automating, predicting, digitalizing, and optimizing company processes and tasks, international companies have flocked to ServiceNow to give their own customers a top-notch experience. ServiceNow’s complex stack actually works against it in the context of data regulations though, as countries with strict data protection laws often require data localization, meaning that sensitive data cannot leave the country of origin. This requires a unique stack setup in each of those countries, which is why international companies are the primary victims of data governance legislation.
Compliance issues in ServiceNow
This problem doesn’t just affect ServiceNow, as any SaaS platform working in the cloud deals with these types of challenges, defining a cloud provider’s architecture and approach to data handling. Companies previously only had to truly worry about protecting sensitive information stored in their systems, but new legislation has vastly expanded the scope of data governance.
This crackdown on how companies use customer data is not even a direct result of governing principles, but rather the increase in public awareness of how people's personal data was being managed and sold by companies like Facebook and Google.
When factoring in the complexity of ServiceNow’s stack, it’s clear this approach is a gargantuan undertaking. It is resource-inefficient, wastes time, and could create customer and user experience issues due to additional layers of processes.
If solving the matter on your own is not effective, what other solutions exist? Mainly, using a specialist third-party platform like InCountry. All SaaS solutions, not only ServiceNow, face this data compliance problem, which is why InCountry has focused on solving this issue. Whereas the combined reach of global clouds only covers a couple dozen countries, InCountry can help companies run compliantly in over 90 countries.
How does it do that? We’ll cover the details in part 2 of data compliance for ServiceNow.
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