Best Practice to Track Legal Hold for Assets, Hard Disks & VMs

PrajjvalSiG
Tera Expert

3 weeks ago

Hello Community,

I’m looking for best-practice guidance on handling Legal Hold scenarios in ServiceNow.

Currently, when a laptop/computer goes into Legal Hold, the HAM team collects the device, and we mark it using a custom Legal Hold checkbox on the computer asset record.

However, we now have additional scenarios:

  1. Hard Disk Swap
    • A laptop goes into Legal Hold.
    • The hard disk is removed and replaced.
    • The same laptop is reissued to another user.
    • The original hard disk must still remain under Legal Hold independently.
  2. Virtual Machines
    • Some VMs also need to be placed under Legal Hold.

Challenge:

  • The client suggested using the Computer Peripheral table for hard disks, but the same serial number as the parent computer is being used, causing duplicate serial number issues.
  • There’s also limited traceability to clearly identify what exactly is under Legal Hold (device vs disk vs VM).

Looking for suggestions on:

  • Best way to model Legal Hold for devices, components (hard disks), and VMs
  • Whether Legal Hold should be a flag on assets or a separate Legal Hold record.
  • How to avoid serial number duplication while maintaining audit and compliance tracking and what should be the unique identifiers for hard discs.
0 Helpfuls
  • 573 Views
1 REPLY 1

Mathew Hillyard
Giga Sage

3 weeks ago

Hi @PrajjvalSiG 

To my knowledge the only place in the platform I've seen Legal hold is a new feature in Legal Request Management - which doesn't help you as you want to implement something in HAM, other than there is no OOTB solution.

 

Legal hold is a process, so what's the organisational process before the assets are required to be placed under legal hold? This will help you to decide the best option.

 

If Legal Hold needs to be a separate record elsewhere in the platform - which I would recommend it is, as it is used to implement a process and could require relationships to multiple records - then ideally you want a (locked down to legal) Legal Hold table with the necessary details, and a related list of the assets under hold (but if you choose asset you need to make sure every CI has an Asset for this scenario - otherwise choose the CI table instead), which would suggest you need a reference field on asset to the Legal Hold table. A flag on the asset wouldn't make much sense - what if you needed two separate Legal Hold cases at the same time? You wouldn't be able to distinguish which asset belonged to which case. By using a related list you can relate any number of specific assets to a specific legal hold scenario.

 

Regarding serial numbers, hard drives would technically have their own serial number and be related to the device they're installed in (because they can be quite high value depending upon capacity and can be installed independently of the device), so giving them the same serial is counter-productive (again, what if the device had two drives and only one needs to be under legal hold?)

 

I hope this helps!

Mat

0 Helpfuls