Blueprint for self-hosting ServiceNow

[Gaurav Bajaj]

This series of blog posts will outline the blueprint for establishing a successful self-hosted ServiceNow instance, taking into account people, processes, and technology. It will be beneficial for platform owners, platform architects, platform administrators, and anyone with a general interest in self-hosting and the initial steps of this journey.

Self-hosting ServiceNow is a complex but sometimes necessary choice for organisations with strict regulatory, data sovereignty, or operational requirements, particularly observed in the Middle East and various other regions globally.

• First things first! Evaluate Your Business Need: Self-Hosted vs. Cloud

Before opting for a self-hosted deployment, organizations must perform a thorough evaluation:

• Business Justification: Regulatory constraints (e.g., data residency laws), industry mandates (e.g., financial sector, public sector), or organisational policies.
• Security Assessment: Determine whether enhanced security measures (e.g., VPN-only access, advanced encryption) in ServiceNow SaaS can meet requirements and consider self-hosting as a last option.
• Cost-Benefit Analysis: Evaluate the expenses associated with infrastructure, licensing, the internal support team, and the long-term Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) in comparison to opting for ServiceNow's cloud-based subscription model.
• Performance & Availability SLAs: The cloud version comes with built-in high availability and disaster recovery. If you are self-hosting, you will need to build it all by yourself in compliance with your organisation's compliance requirements.

Move to the next point if you have already decided to start with a self-hosting deployment.

• Build your "A-Team"

A self-hosted ServiceNow setup requires cross-functional expertise, not just ServiceNow knowledge:

Here are some of the essential roles which are critical to set you up for the right foundation:

• Platform Administrator: Handles platform-level configuration, patching, cloning, and upgrades and monitors application performance. This role will have more responsibility as opposed to a cloud-based ServiceNow instance platform admin.
• Infrastructure Administrator: Manages servers on which the ServiceNow application nodes and database will be hosted, OS-level configuration, and monitoring.
• Database Administrator (DBA): Ensures database availability, performance, and backups.
• Security Officer: Oversees compliance, encryption, and access control.
• Monitoring Specialist: Implements proactive health checks, alerts, and tracks several performance metrics.

•  Conduct a ServiceNow Self-Hosted Workshop

Before initiating the deployment:

• Ask for ServiceNow Workshop: ServiceNow provides a self-hosting technical workshop as an offering for self-hosting customer to enable their self-hosting team in order to install as well as manage the ServiceNow platform. This will assist you in addressing compliance requirements from your organisation. Please reach out to your account manager for more details.

• Understand ServiceNow Architecture: Enable your team to understand ServiceNow recommendations on Architecture (Load balancer, high availability, scalability, Disaster recovery and specifications). ServiceNow will share the right documentation for installation guidelines, size your instance and the software required to run the platform.

• Engage Cross-Functional IT Teams Early

      Successful deployment requires tight coordination among multiple teams. I'll elaborate on it in the next blog where I'll address the design considerations for a successful self-hosting instance.

• Network & Security:  Set up firewalls, proxy rules, VPNs, and IPS/IDS; support for HTTPS termination.
• Server Team: Provision and manage virtual/physical servers, storage, and OS patching
• Application Monitoring: Integrate with monitoring tools (e.g., Splunk, AppDynamics, Dynatrace) to track metrics and alerts.
• Database Team: Set up DB instances with replication, backup, HA/DR capabilities

•      Get yourself access to the ServiceNow Support Portal

Access to the ServiceNow Support Portal is essential to manage your self-hosted instance for raising technical cases, downloading patches, requesting plugin activations, and accessing critical security updates. The support team can also assist you with installation in case the outcome does not match with installation steps.

Now that you have the appropriate resources and have established a committed self-hosting team, it is time to examine the design considerations to prevent technical and performance debt resulting from poor design practices. I'll publish the second blog post soon!!