Has domain separation fallen out of favor?

[chking]

So, in my new life, I am in charge of our current ITSM offering, which is mainly done through individual tenancies to state agencies on a single primary instance. As I look at what ServiceNow has that is similar, my research keeps leading me towards domain separation. The more I read, the more I like what domain separation has to offer. But, I am stymied on two fronts: it looks as if domain separation has largely been ignored from a webinar or Knowledge standpoint since 2015 or so, and various professional services have tried to steer us away from it. When I talk to other state government service providers, they have opted against domain separation, and largely give reporting as a reason (which, again, my research doesn't agree with 100%).

That being said, I have questions:

1) Is domain separation still a preferred method to provide separate entities with mostly-segregated data and services on a single instance?

2) Are currently-separated folks happy or unhappy with that arrangement?

3) If domain separation is solution non grata, what are the alternatives? I have heard of options ranging from ACL separation of data to scoping applications for each tenant.

4) Am I missing something obvious (or not) here?

Thanks for any and all input, and for suffering fools 😄

[jeff_tam · Accepted solution]

Hi Chris,

I have attempted to answer your questions in my response below.  

Domain Separation is not going away or becoming obsolete from what I can tell.   In fact, the latest takeaway message I'm seeing from the communication channels, internal ServiceNow TOIs, etc. is that continued investments are being made to increase support levels for Domain Separation across the various products and applications.   For organizations that operate in an MSP model where their clients/customers operate as physical separate companies and do not need to share data with each other nor do the clients/customers need the freedoms to ServiceNow system administer their own processes and applications, Domain Separation could be a good fit.     The challenge though is that not every product supports Domain Separation and if it does, the level it supports varies as well as we can see from the latest support matrix in Jakarta docs.   So a decision on whether or not Domain Separation is a good option for a company largely depends on their use cases and what it is they are trying to accomplish.

With scoped Extension Applications, it provides similar benefits to what Domain Separation provides in terms of Global Reporting, Data Separation and Process Separation.   Architecturally, using extension apps to achieve multi-tenancy is very different than Domain Separation.   The additional benefits in using extension apps is that the tenants or business entities can have more freedoms in administering their own processes and applications through Delegated Development at the scoped application level.   In addition, sharing or exchanging of data is much simpler to accomplish in an extension application model through the use of Glide APIs.   With Domain Separation, you have to create visibility and/or contains rules and depending on the potential exchange scenarios that exists, that becomes difficult to scale and manage as we've seen.   That being said though, there has to be a strong governance model put into place with this approach to ensure that the instance isn't put into a position where it isn't supportable.   Creating a copy of a scoped application takes time as well so there is some implementation uplift that needs to be factored in as well to determine if this approach is scalable for the organization considering it.

One can argue that you can leverage ACLs, BR/Query Rules, and other native platform components to achieve some degree of data separation and process separation as well.   That is absolutely accurate but the decision to go this path depends on how much separation it is you're trying to accomplish.   If you're basically, reinventing Domain Separation without the plugin, how much effort is it going to take and is it worth it to go down this path?   Depending on the level of effort and complexity required to build something out, it make more sense to leverage Domain Separation or Extension Apps.

Long story short, there isn't a one size fits all approach when it comes to achieving "multi-tenancy" in ServiceNow.   It will largely be based on the use-cases including any data / sovereignty type regulations that the customer has as well as what their current & future roadmap looks like.    

I hope this helps.

Thanks,
Jeff

[chking]

Thanks, Jeff! That's a lot of great information -- definitely gives us a lot to think about.I appreciate it!